First, let's define what I mean by 'the first'.<p>The first smartphone, I'd say, should be defined as the first device that was attributed to be a smartphone (either coined the term or was introduced as a smartphone) and as would have been available for purchase by the mass market (even if it was expensive). I think it could be argued that the first designed or prototyped smartphone should be considered and thought about, but I think a product that actually made it to market is more worthy of that title.<p>I've been looking around a bit and the most prominent out there is Simon (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-29/before-iphone-and-android-came-simon-the-first-smartphone) but not sure if that's exactly the case.<p>Would love to hear everyone's thoughts!
It's always a tricky thing to pinpoint when great tech first came this way. Sometimes, we're not even sure if it was great tech when it makes a splash so that may be part of the reason.<p>I was able to find this that corroborates with BW on the Simon :
<a href="http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/09/18/20-years-ago-the-first-smartphone-was-developed-whats-next-for-mobility/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/09/18/20-years-ago-the-first-sm...</a><p>If you're ignoring the "phone" bit of "Smartphone", it's basically a PDA first. So the first PDA would be the Organizer by Psion : <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser</a><p>If you want to mix PDA and phone proper, the first time that happened was with the Nokia 9000 : <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator</a>
I had a sony ericsson walkman phone which had an app store. I installed a nice chat application which let me chat on Google talk and facebook. It's email client was pretty decent (for the time), it ran Opera mini, and it also had a twitter client. I guess that was smart enough to be called a smart phone. The phone was also about a centimeter thick, and in that time (probably even for now), it was sleek and beautiful. I miss that phone.