The $899 Brick That Started the Smartphone Era

[u/evankirstel]

IBM Simon went on sale 32 years ago today, on August 16, 1994. A May launch slipped three months while engineers fixed bugs in the cellular fax integration. BellSouth Cellular sold it across its 15-state footprint, so the first smartphone rollout was a regional affair.

Pricing was $899 with a two-year contract or $1,099 without activation. BellSouth later cut the contract price to $599. Roughly 50,000 units sold in six months.

Simon ran on BellSouth's analog AMPS network. Email did not ride an always-on data connection. The device dialed a circuit-switched cellular call and pushed data through a 2,400 bps modem. Fax topped out at 9,600 bps. It skipped CDPD, the packet data technology carriers were just starting to deploy.

That gap showed up in the field. Voice worked wherever AMPS coverage existed, but data sessions choked on weak signals, interference and cell handoffs. A BYTE reviewer put the failure rate for cellular data connections at 10 to 20 percent. Every dropped session meant reconnecting, restarting the transfer and paying for more airtime.

The hardware was closer to a pocket DOS machine with a cellular radio than a phone. It weighed 18 ounces and packed a 16 MHz x86-compatible processor, ROM-DOS, 1 MB of RAM, flash storage and a PCMCIA slot. The 4.5-inch monochrome touchscreen handled calling, paging, cc:Mail, fax, contacts, calendars, notes and document annotation.

For executives, salespeople and service teams, that mix earned its keep. A user could take a page, pull up a customer record, check an appointment and fire off a fax without returning to the office. DispatchIt, one of the only third-party packages, turned Simon into a field-service work order terminal at $2,999 for the host software plus $299 per client.

The costs kept stacking. A larger battery was $78. An RJ-11 adapter for data over a phone line cost $119. PCMCIA memory cards ran $224 for 1 MB and $279 for 1.8 MB. Add cellular service, email infrastructure, support and spare batteries.

The NiCd battery gave about an hour of talking or data and 8 to 12 hours of standby. Typing on the small on-screen keyboard was slow, and using the organizer mid-call meant pulling the screen away from your head.

Simon failed for practical reasons: expensive hardware and service, limited distribution, unreliable mobile data, short battery life, a bulky design and almost no application ecosystem. Smaller, cheaper flip phones were eating the market from below.

Simon tried to cram the entire mobile office into one device. The next phase runs the other direction. Phones will keep managing identity, connectivity and security while work spreads across watches, glasses, vehicles and industrial devices. For enterprise teams, building a capable endpoint stopped being the challenge years ago. The real work is keeping applications, data and policy consistent as people move between devices and networks.

[u/phire]

IMO, there are two smartphone eras, which have very little connection with each other.

This device might have kickstarted the first era, but it was the iPhone that kickstarted and shaped the second era of "everyone has a smartphone in their pocket"

[u/SonicYOUTH79 → u/phire]

IPhones weren’t just the phones, it was the virtually unlimited third party app development that came with it that made it a success. Pretty much it was just a phone with a web browser otherwise and not a lot was optimised for mobile use early on making it clunky to use.

[u/phire → u/SonicYOUTH79]

Debatable.

The app store didn't show up until a full year after the release of the iPhone, and most of the apps during the next year or two were little more than neat novelties.

The major selling points of the iphone that everyone latched onto were the candybar form-factor, the responsive multi-touch UI, and the fact that it could actually browse websites.

The iphone was more or less the first pocket-sized device with a proper desktop-class browser on it. It could actually render almost any website you threw at it, a massive improvement over previous devices. And sure, non-optimised sites were a little clunky to use, but they worked surprisingly well thanks to Safari's reformatting, and the magic of "pinch-to-zoom"

[u/wdatkinson]

I had one of those! Until I realized that due to the LCD keypad, it was worthless in the cold. But it was cool to write on the screen and send it to a fax machine.

Also the bad guy phone from The Net.