IBM Simon

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The IBM Simon Personal Communicator was the first attempt to market a commercially viable smartphone and was a joint venture between IBM and BellSouth. Simon was first shown as a product concept in 1992 at COMDEX, the communications industry trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Launched in 1993 it combined the features of a mobile phone, a pager, a PDA, and a fax machine. After some delays it was sold by BellSouth in 1994 in 190 U.S. cities in 15 states and was originally priced at $899.

Besides a mobile phone, the major applications were a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, and games. It had no physical buttons to dial with. Instead customers used a touch-screen to select phone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with either a unique on-screen "predictive" keyboard or QWERTY keyboard.