The Treo was hardly the original smartphone. Nokia had the Communicator before that, and Alcatel had the One Touch Com in 1996: http://data.motor-talk.de/data/galleries/0/3/7206/16273817/p...

Apples spin wasn't ditching the keyboard as so many people think, it was designing the user interface around finger-based touch, making the interface easy enough for normal people to use, and finally to ship a decent performing browser at a time when most other phones were a nightmare to use when browsing the web (try a N95, also released in 2007, to see what I mean)

You're right.

I forgot about the communicator because I didn't consider it a smart-enough phone to use. I kept using my Palm Pilot Pro becuse it gave me the productivity I needed. The communicator definitely had a keyboard and apps though, I just didn't find them usable at the time.

By far it is still one of the most bad ass looking phones, with that folding out.

On a side note, the Handspring Visor Phone addon is also worthy of a shoutout, since it was out before the Treo..

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Handspring_Releases_V...

i'd have said 1996 with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

but it was a niche product that probably didn't appear in the u.s. much.

as a psion user i lusted after these devices. but price of mobile data put them out of my reach.

i used a psion 5 as my main computer till 99 when i wanted to start ripping cds for an mp3 player amongst other things.

I owned a P800 and I consider the iPhone to be in a completely different class. Each of the individual differences is small, but when taken together the feel of using them is quite different.

To be fair, the P800 had a 150mhz processor and 16 MB of RAM and could display a whopping 4,098 colors. It came out around the same time as Windows XP SP1.

> Each of the individual differences is small, but when taken together the feel of using them is quite different.

Fair enough, but now you're describing evolution, not revolution.