What was the first Smartphone?

I would say at least year 16.

The first phone I considered a full, semi-modern smartphone (eg. able to install 3rd party apps, and full featured with Wifi, UMTS/3G, Camera, GPS and touchscreen - albeit resistive eg. with a stylus) was a Taiwanese one (Compal), made for a German company that had quite a market share of PDAs back then (Fujitsu Siemens).

That is the 2006 Pocket Loox T830.

fujitsu-siemens-pocket-loox-2

Mine still runs fine today. New battery, of course. And modded quite a bit, for example to get better GPS performance.

PS: The first iPhone one year later 2007, eg. 15 years ago, was not a full smartphone by my definition yet, because it didn’t have GPS (and no 3G).

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GPS was what I waited for before buying one, actually.

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What and when was your first one, then?

Also calling the nerds @Marco , @slawa and so on - what do you consider the first Smartphone? And what/when was your first Smartphone?

I had this when I was in the army, in 2005.

It ran on Windows CE. It was made by HTC.

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Handspring Treos and Windows CE phones were available in the early 2000s.

There were earlier phones that were PDAs with phones, but not really a integrated smartphone per se. There were also earlier phones with apps / organizers / communicators, but nothing that I would really consider smartphones.

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Thought apple invented the smart fone
I still have MY first smart fone

It was made by hua Wei and was a copy of the first Apple phone and it was 100 bucks instead of 600 for the apple

I had that with me on my last trip to Taiwan in 2012

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That’s what they want you to believe :wink:

It really depends on the definition. By mine, they for sure didn’t.

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I think the HP iPAQ are the first.
The Toshiba e805 was the ultimate until the iPhone came.

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So which one would you consider a full smartphone? The Treo line got GPS in 2008 as far as I can tell, so for me they are early - but not first.

htc was first android

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Interesting, thanks!

The first iPAQ that mostly fits my personal definition of smartphone seems to be the hw6900, which came out late in 2006 - before the iphone, but after “my” first smartphone mentioned above. It only misses 3G, but that’s maybe acceptable.

If you discount Wifi and 3G, then the hw6500 of 2005 might have been a contender. But no Wifi is a no-go for a smartphone for my personal opinion.

Toshiba e805 looks interesting, but as far as I can tell had no “phone” (so also no 2G/3G), no camera, no GPS

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I’m not sure why GPS would be a line to determine something is or isn’t a smartphone. If GPS didn’t exist, would everything we currently have not count as a smartphone despite all their other capabilities? Makes no sense. The first iphone also didn’t have gps btw - not a smartphone (I would say the first iphone was arguably not a smartphone for other reasons)?

The treos and ce phones, are in my mind, certainly smartphones.

Windows Mobile phones started showing up in ~2005 with GPS iirc (I remember my windows mobile HTC touch had gps, and it certainly wasn’t the first - it came out just before the iphone, so probably mid 2007?). Blackberries had GPS starting in early 2007 as well (but had much more limited apps).

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Good point. GPS is in my personal definition because (amongst other things) I consider a smartphone to be a device that replaces all other mobile devices that I might carry around. Hence I only considered getting a smartphone once they evolved to the point where I could navigate with them. So that I didn’t need my car GPS any more, and could find my way in new cities.

Pre-2008 Treos also didn’t have Wifi by the way, as far as I can tell. That’s a must for me, else I can’t easily use internet on it at home (at that times 2G/3G internet was slow and expensive)

Yes the first iphone is not a smartphone for me: No GPS. Oh, and no 3G, but that’s probably just a “nice to have”.

So for me the first smartphone is the device that finally combined all those things that many PDAs etc. supported already for a while - but not all at once.

  1. Able to install 3rd party apps
  2. Touchscreen
  3. Wifi
  4. Cell Phone
  5. Mobile Internet (ideally UMTS/3G)
  6. Camera
  7. GPS
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Yep 2008. A bit late for “first” smartphone, unfortunately :stuck_out_tongue:

I think around 2005/6 I had a few Samsungs and an Ericsson that dicked around the edges of being smartphones, but my first love was the Nokia e71. Definitely not THE first smartphone, but MY first smartphone.

I used the crap out of that phone and loved the physical keyboard, the terrible thing about it was it’s useless camera.

I still have one and wish I could find some (proper) batteries and.rubber bits to bring it back to life.

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It’s a must now. Wi-fi was only starting to get popular in the mid 2000s - iirc, the ibook in 1999 was the first laptop aimed at the masses with (optional) wifi (draft spec?) as an option; it was so unknown to the public that Jobs passed the ibook through a hula hoop to show it wasn’t connected to a wire on stage, but able to load up a website.

You’re defining a smartphone by features, vs capabilities. If wifi goes away, a smartphone becomes not a smartphone, even if it has more ubiquitous data available? And you defined a “ideal” mobile internet option on a basically dead technology. ;D

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They made the first one worth paying for. Same story with iPod, iPad and airpods.

Sorry, I don’t mean to push my personal definition (requirements) of “smartphone” onto you. In this thread I’m wondering two things:
a) What do other people see as the first smartphone, based on their criteria/definition
b) Whether anyone knows any devices that fulfilled my criteria/definition before ~mid 2006

Ah I see what you mean. For me the capability counts, not the exact feature. I guess similar to you. Let’s see…I guess we can get this clarified in a sec.

I guess this is where we were thinking about different things. Of course the above was speaking about the time of the first smartphone. When 3G was high-end.

For me personally, no WiFi was an absolute deal breaker back then, and maybe even nowadays. Simply because at home I want to use Wifi, and on the move I want to use mobile (cell) internet. Back then it was an absolute must, because the mobile (cell) internet was extremely slow and expensive. Especially in Germany. Nowadays in Taiwan maybe Wifi is becoming optional indeed, since mobile internet is so good and cheap here. But still in backwater Germany I’d very much prefer WiFi even today :slight_smile:

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Batteries should be these here: https://shopee.tw/search?facet=11047669&keyword=bp-4l

Rubber bits… hmmm… which bits are necessary?

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The first touchscreen smartphone was made by LG, not Apple.

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