In a similar vein, people should be aware of the Danger Hiptop/Sidekick. Its physical design might seem outdated, especially the affordance for a physical keyboard, but let's remember that this came out a full five years before the iPhone. For the time it offered an unparalleled convergence of PDA, phone, internet connectivity, and entertainment value. I had one for a while. It was far from perfect (writing the entire OS in Java is probably the dumbest idea that killed it) but I can't help but admire the innovation that went into it.
If you can, watch the documentary "General Magic". I got it off Showtime. Hadn't finished it yet, but what I've seen so far is great, if painful. By "painful", it's easy for a developer to put themselves in their shoes. Imagine putting your heart and soul into a product, knowing you're making something great and world-changing, being right, then watching it fail. Then later be vindicated by other products on the market.
Impulse bought a Datarover from eBay a few years ago. The device itself is an ugly grey box, but Magic Cap is a delight. In fact, if the backlight hadn’t have died I’d still be using it as a landline phone.
Full of delight, something that modern OSes are sorely missing.
Little touches like being able to drop a little animated worm in the hallway and watch it crawl about - and it still being there when you come back later.
It’s a real shame that a decade ago, when incumbent phone makers were scrambling around trying to find a response to iOS, no one dusted it off and updated it for the modern world. Would have been such a contrast to the standard grid of boring icons.
LGR has a great video about General Magic, the company behind Magic Cap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64
Kind of off topic, but "General Magic" is a really cool name for a company.
I was a user of Maemo before the iPhone came out and it continued to be more capable than iOS and Android for years afterwards, and is arguably so today.
The Internet Archive has classic Mac emulators, right? Someone should upload the image for the Magic Cap simulator there.
It's interesting the various visions that were out there at the time. I was keeping track of it as I was an enthusiastic user of my HP200LX, and could tell the general idea of a computer fitting in your pocket and talking to the internet was a very potent one, even though the internet at the time was email, usenet and ftp.
General Magic was a big one, as was the Newton, though both were obviously too expensive to achieve serious market penetration. Geos was another important one; it was a pretty slick OS that could have beaten Windows or been the birth of a palmtop OS.
One of the striking things; lots of people really believed the only way to use a pocket computer was with handwriting recognition. The Palm "graffiti" tool for achieving this was pretty obviously never going to work (aka teach people a new form of handwriting) compared to keyboards. The fold away keyboard of the HP OmniGo was kind of an admission of this.
Also don't forget the Nokia Communicator Series, the 9000, 9110, 9210 series - you could even send and receive faxes :D
The documentary linked in the article is really good. I managed to grab a datarover in early 2000s from ebay and had a ton of fun with it but the newton was still my daily driver back then.
A smartphone thirty six years before the iPhone.
https://www.geek.com/apple/apples-first-touchscreen-phone-14...
The iPhone is a progression of PDAs more than phones. There are plenty of interesting devices to look at including Apple's own Newton, the Sony Dynabook, the Palm Pilot and all its versions up through Sony Clie as well as Windows CE and its many devices. My 1998 Casio CE at some level is very similar to a modern iPhone. Both have a home screen with a gird of app icons to tap to launch them.