The Smartphone Cometh

This is the Second in a series I am doing on the history behind Android App Inventor

The SmartPhone cometh.

The telephone and the personal computer have had a very close relationship since the very dawn of their existence.  By the time the computer became common place, telephone company infrastructure was established and relatively stable. It didn’t take long for computer scientist and hobbyist to start trying to make computers talk to each other over the phone. From the earliest efforts to communicate across the telephone wires, came the birth of the information age and the Internet. In just 25 or so years the personal computer and the telephone were locked into a symbiotic relationship that connected not just computers but people via written word. Email, the World Wide Web and the easy connectivity of the well-established telephone industry provided for a rich and rapid growth of new means of communicating and managing information.
As demand increased for more functionality from personal computers, their size decreased and their capability increased. The early days of ugly furniture size computers and grainy displays faded into sleek, vibrant and fashionable miniaturization.   Soon, laptops, PDA’s and hand held computers became common place. Alongside the growth of the personal computer, the cell phone had it’s own rapid growth. Brick-like, expensive and unreliable cell phones gave way to affordable and functional cell phones. It seems in retrospect that it was inevitable that the two primary technological means of communication would merge and become something even better. Soon the power and functionality of personal computers, along with the portability and connectedness of cellphones would merge into something entirely new and different.
As the need to stay connected in the business world and the business of modern life increased, more and more functionality began to migrate over onto the cell phone. The first logical step was that of managing WHO you needed to contact and when you needed to contact them. Cell phones began to include contact and scheduling functionality. The age of the “on-the-go” professional was upon us and we needed to have our rolodex, calendar and telephone with us at all times.

In 1992 IBM introduced Simon, the first “smartphone”. The Simon was a cellphone that was more than just a way to communicate with the spoken word. It included a contact manager, email, and fax. On top of communication capabilities it had functionality that could be useful to its owner completely outside the realm of communication. It had a notepad, a calendar, a world clock and a calculator.  Many of these types of functionality had shown up from time to time on other cellphones in one form or another. But the Simon was unique in that it allowed interaction with all that functionality via a touchscreen interface.  The Smartphone was born and many other manufacturers began to bring to market phones with functionality that went well beyond that of just communication. Nokia, Ericcson, and other manufacturers quickly began to design and manufacture hardware that could support this new concept of a multi-use phone-computer.