IBM Simon, or the first computer you could also make calls on
In November 1992, an IBM engineer named Frank Canova carried a large black slab to a display table at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas, connected it to nothing, and suggested that this thing — his thing — might be the future of the phone. The device had a touchscreen. It sent email. It kept a calendar. It also, when needed, made calls. Canova called it the Sweetspot. The next morning, USA Today ran his face on the front page.
Two years later, the Sweetspot became the IBM Simon Personal Communicator. On August 16, 1994, BellSouth put it on sale across fifteen U.S. states for $899 with a two-year contract, or $1,099 without one. At 510 grams — just over a pound — it was roughly the size and weight of a hardback novel. It had a 4.5-inch black-and-white touchscreen, a predictive keyboard, a stylus, a built-in modem for faxing, and Lotus cc:Mail for electronic mail. It ran eleven built-in applications: address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, to-do list, notepad, sketch pad, world clock, calculator, and three keyboard configurations. BellSouth’s product manager reached for a clarifying distinction: it was “the first time a company had placed a computer in a cellular phone, rather than a cellular phone in a computer.”
IBM hadn’t built anything quite like it before, and Motorola — approached to manufacture the commercial version — declined. Mitsubishi Electric took on the job instead. For distribution, IBM turned to BellSouth Cellular Corp., which put the Simon on its analog AMPS network across those fifteen states — a joint venture that said something about what the industry suspected: this category belonged to neither computers nor phones alone.
The Simon sold for exactly six months. By February 1995, production had ceased. Approximately 50,000 units changed hands during that window. The battery lasted one hour under normal use. One hour. A device whose purpose was to put the whole office in your pocket ran out of charge before most office meetings ended. That engineering detail, more than the $1,099 price tag, killed it.
The word “smartphone” never attached to the Simon in 1994 — that term was coined later by Ericsson, for a different device. Simon’s public life was brief enough that it appeared as a prop in the 1995 film The Net without audiences needing a caption. That says something. The concept was already legible. The world understood what a handheld communicator was for, even if it hadn’t yet seen one that could stay charged long enough to prove the point.
What the Simon actually established was the shape of the idea: a pocket computer that happened to make calls, rather than a phone that happened to keep a calendar. That distinction — which function is primary — would define the smartphone market for the next thirty years. IBM answered computer. The phone companies, through most of the 1990s and 2000s, answered phone. It took Apple, in 2007, to close the argument by refusing to call the iPhone a phone at all.
The battery lasted an hour. The idea lasted rather longer.
Sources
- IBM Simon — Wikipedia — Frank Canova, COMDEX 1992 announcement, August 16 1994 release, specifications, price, sales figures, battery life, and discontinuation February 1995
- IBM Simon — Mobile Phone Museum — BellSouth distribution, Mitsubishi manufacturing, Lotus cc:Mail, predictive keyboard, and the product manager quote