If you ask most people what the first smartphone was, they’ll say the iPhone. Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco in January 2007, and for an entire generation, that’s where the smartphone story begins.
But it’s wrong — off by thirteen years, in fact. The first true smartphone went on sale in 1994. It had a touchscreen, installable apps, email, and a battery so bad it barely survived an hour. It sold roughly 50,000 units and was killed within a year. And you’ve probably never held one.
Here’s the full story of the first smartphone — the device nobody called a smartphone, and why the answer is more interesting than the iPhone myth.
What Was the First Smartphone Ever Made?
The first smartphone was the IBM Simon Personal Communicator, released in the United States on August 16, 1994. Designed by IBM and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric, it combined a cellular phone with a touchscreen and pocket-computer functions — calendar, contacts, email, fax, notepad, and a world clock — nearly a decade and a half before the App Store existed.
The word “smartphone” didn’t exist yet. IBM marketed the Simon as a “Personal Communicator.” But by every modern definition — phone plus computing plus apps — the Simon was the first smartphone, and the title has stuck with it ever since.
The IBM Simon: A Brick That Was Ahead of Everything
The Simon’s origin story starts at COMDEX, the big computer trade show in Las Vegas, on November 23, 1992. IBM engineer Frank Canova showed off a prototype codenamed “Sweetspot” — a phone with a touchscreen and built-in software. It was so far ahead of its time that people barely knew what to do with it. IBM spent two years turning the prototype into a real product.
What the Simon Could Actually Do
Pick up a Simon and the first thing you’d notice was the screen: a 4.5-inch monochrome touchscreen (160×293 pixels), operated with a stylus. No buttons on the front at all — radical for 1994, when every other phone was a slab of plastic keys.
Underneath, it ran on a 16MHz processor with 1MB of RAM. Laughable today, but in context, that was serious hardware — genuinely comparable to the desktop PCs many people owned at the time. It connected through a 2400 bps modem and came preloaded with 11 applications: a calendar, appointment scheduler, address book, calculator, notepad, sketch pad, to-do list, world clock, electronic fax, and email. It even had an on-screen QWERTY keyboard.
New software arrived on special PCMCIA memory cards that slid into the bottom of the device. It wasn’t an app store, but the idea was already there: a phone that gets smarter with downloadable software.
Why the Simon Flopped
For all its ambition, the Simon was a commercial disaster — and the reasons read like a checklist of every problem early smartphones had:
- The battery was dreadful. A nickel-cadmium pack gave you about one hour of talk time. You were essentially tethered to a charger.
- It was enormous. At 500 grams — over a pound — it weighed more than a modern iPad. Your pocket didn’t stand a chance.
- It was expensive. BellSouth sold it for $899 with a two-year contract (over $1,400 in today’s money), or $1,099 contract-free.
- It barely worked anywhere. The Simon only operated on BellSouth’s cellular network across 15 US states. Travel outside that footprint and you owned a very expensive paperweight.
Around 50,000 units sold in six months. By February 1995, BellSouth discontinued it. IBM had built the future and the market shrugged.
Still, the Simon earned its place in history. It’s now a permanent exhibit in London’s Science Museum, and engineers still point to it as the device that proved a phone could be a computer.
The Contenders: Phones That Almost Got the Title
The Simon wasn’t the only early device blurring the line between phone and computer. A few others stake a claim — and they’re part of why the “first smartphone” question has multiple answers depending on who you ask.
Nokia 9000 Communicator (1996)
Two years after the Simon, Nokia shipped the 9000 Communicator — a clamshell device with a full QWERTY keyboard, a wide screen, and PDA functions like email and web browsing, running on an Intel 386-class processor with the GEOS operating system. It was bulky (397 grams) but genuinely useful, and it sold far better than the Simon. The Communicator line ran for over a decade and set the template for business smartphones.
Ericsson GS88 (1997)
Here’s a fun one: the Ericsson GS88, released in 1997, is credited as the first device where the term “smart phone” was used in marketing — Ericsson literally called it the “Smart Phone.” It was a pen-based PDA-phone hybrid, and it’s the answer if you’re asking about the first time the word appeared rather than the concept.
The First Phone Actually Marketed as a “Smartphone”: Ericsson R380 (2000)
If you want the first device that was sold with the word “smartphone” on the box, that was the Ericsson R380, released in 2000 for about $700. It was also the first phone to run the Symbian operating system — the software platform that would go on to dominate the mobile world until Apple and Google arrived.
The R380 was a clever design: a standard numeric keypad on a flip cover that opened to reveal a resistive touchscreen. At 164 grams it was genuinely pocketable, unlike the Nokia Communicator bricks it competed with. It packed a calendar, to-do list, world clock, voice memos, contacts, infrared data transfer, and WAP internet browsing. The one limitation: you couldn’t install new apps on it — the software you got was the software you kept.
What Actually Made Phones Smart: The Software
Hardware was only half the story. What turned phones from clever gadgets into the pocket computers we carry today was software — operating systems, developers, and the idea that a phone’s capabilities should grow over time.
Symbian proved a real phone OS could work at scale. Then came BlackBerry’s email-obsessed devices in 1999, Palm’s Treo line, and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Each one pushed the industry toward the same conclusion: the winning phone wouldn’t be the one with the best hardware specs, but the one with the best platform. That platform thinking is exactly what made the iPhone and Android explosive — and it’s why software engineering became one of the most important disciplines in technology. Every modern smartphone is really a software project that happens to make calls.
The Firsts People Actually Ask About
Since the “first smartphone” question spawns so many follow-ups, here are the specific firsts worth knowing:
- First touchscreen phone: The IBM Simon (1994). It beat everything else by years.
- First phone marketed as a smartphone: The Ericsson R380 (2000), running Symbian.
- First smartphone with a camera: The Sony Ericsson P800 (2002), following Sharp’s J-SH04 in Japan.
- First Android smartphone: The HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1), released October 2008 — a year after the iPhone, with a slide-out keyboard and the first version of Android.
- First iPhone: June 2007. Revolutionary, but a latecomer to the smartphone concept by over a decade.
And the question that always comes up: no, smartphones did not start in 2007. They started in a BellSouth store in 1994, in the hands of a few thousand business users who faxed documents from a touchscreen the size of a credit card.
Why the Simon’s DNA Is in Your Pocket Right Now
Look at your phone and count what the Simon did first: touchscreen input, an on-screen keyboard, apps, email, a calendar that syncs, a to-do list, a world clock. The hardware took thirty years to catch up to the idea, but the idea was complete in 1994. Even the Simon’s failures predicted the industry’s biggest battles — battery life is still the constraint every phone maker fights, and the $899 price tag is roughly what a flagship costs today, inflation aside.
The smartphone revolution didn’t begin with a keynote. It began with a 500-gram brick, a stylus, and one hour of battery life — built by IBM engineers who saw, in 1992, exactly where the world was heading.
FAQ
Was the iPhone the first smartphone?
No. The iPhone (2007) popularized the modern smartphone, but the first smartphone was the IBM Simon Personal Communicator, released in 1994 — thirteen years earlier. The iPhone’s breakthrough was the capacitive multi-touch screen and the App Store model, not the smartphone concept itself.
What was the first touchscreen phone?
The IBM Simon (1994) was the first phone with a touchscreen. It used a resistive screen operated with a stylus, along with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard — features that wouldn’t become standard until the late 2000s.
Who invented the first smartphone?
IBM engineer Frank Canova led the team behind the Simon, building the “Sweetspot” prototype demonstrated at COMDEX in November 1992. The commercial device was designed by IBM and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric.
What was the first Android smartphone?
The HTC Dream — sold in the US as the T-Mobile G1 — launched in October 2008 as the first phone running Android. It had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a touchscreen, and launched with the Android Market, the ancestor of Google Play.
Did smartphones exist before 2007?
Yes. Beyond the Simon (1994), there were the Nokia 9000 Communicator (1996), the Ericsson R380 (2000), BlackBerry devices from 1999 onward, and Palm Treos — all smartphones by any reasonable definition, just without today’s app ecosystems.
The Bottom Line
The first smartphone wasn’t a sleek slab of glass — it was a brick that most people laughed at and almost nobody bought. But the IBM Simon proved the concept that now runs the world: a phone that’s really a computer. Every time you tap an app, send an email from your pocket, or check your calendar on a touchscreen, you’re using an idea that a team of IBM engineers got working in 1994, on a 16MHz processor, with one hour of battery life. The future arrived early. It just needed thirty years to fit in your pocket.
