How the smartphone landscape has changed since the launch of IBM Simon 20 years ago

Many may stake a claim, but the first real smartphone was IBM’s Simon — it was the first to merge the capabilities of a cellular phone and PDA. It could make calls, send/receive faxes, emails, it had applications like an address book, calendar+appointments, and a world clock — not bad for a device that was released 20 years ago.

A look at Simon’s specifications will illustrate how far we’ve progressed since those days. Simon had a 16Mhz (not Ghz!) processor, 1MB RAM and 1MB storage. It weighed 550 grams (more than today’s 10-inch tablet) and had a battery life of one hour. Today, think of all the things that your smartphone can do and all the things it replaces. The first and most obvious is the camera. Some years ago, there was a lot of debate about whether the quality offered by phone cameras was catching up to standalone cameras. And in 2009, photographer Chase Jarvis felled all arguments when he literally wrote the book on the subject. It was called The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You — referring of course to the fact that we carry our phones around all the time. Now, the importance of newspapers and magazines is diminishing since you can get all the latest news in an instant on your phone. People are disconnecting landline phones (and their numbers are dropping steadily — both in developed and developing nations).

Dictionaries, encyclopaedias, yellow pages, paper maps, paper photo albums, pocket notebooks, voice recorders, alarm clocks, flashlights, egg timers, stopwatches, public phone booths and atlases are defunct. People are increasingly reading books on smartphones — especially the larger screen devices or ‘phablets’. Standalone GPS navigators are hard to come by because all modern smartphones have GPS built in — and companies like Google made detailed maps and navigation free, limitless. You don’t need bulky calculators, standalone music players, video/media players and camcorders.

And finally, let’s talk about t he most recent casualty — portable gaming systems. As smartphones grew more powerful, they’ve managed to match and even surpass the computing power offered by portable gaming systems. The smartphone (and the tablet) is where the gaming heat is at, partly because the smartphone turned an entire industry on its head. From charging exorbitant amounts for game software that sold few numbers, game developers now prefer to develop cheap or free (sometime’s ad supported) games that get used by millions of users at a time. So what’s next? Some smartphones with infrared emitters are already replacing the old remote control. With NFC, they’ll soon be replacing credit cards and other forms of plastic money. With docking stations, wireless keyboards and external displays, they’ll soon replace your PC. Other innovations have them replacing keys — and what’s next? Only the next smartphone will tell.