Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from House Stuff.
Speaker 1: Hi there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan
Speaker 1: Strickland and I'm Lauren, and today we wanted to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about the history of smartphones, and before
Speaker 1: we really get into it, I thought we'd probably dive
Speaker 1: just a bit into our own personal history with smartphones. Lauren,
Speaker 1: do you own a smartphone? I do, in fact on
Speaker 1: a smartphone. Gosh, Lauren, what kind of smartphone do you own?
Speaker 1: I have an iPhone for okay, so iPhone for one
Speaker 1: of the very popular models out there. I actually have
Speaker 1: an iPhone four as well, though I use mine as
Speaker 1: an iPod touch because it's a hand me down. My
Speaker 1: wife has an iPhone five. She loves it. She and
Speaker 1: Syrie have nice long conversations of which I get to
Speaker 1: take no part. But I also do have my own
Speaker 1: legitimate smartphone, legitimate and that it's actually connected to a
Speaker 1: cellular network, because my phone is not. I have an
Speaker 1: Android phone HTCG two to be precise, which was the
Speaker 1: successor to the HTCG one that'll come in handy later.
Speaker 1: But uh I was a late adopter to the smartphone
Speaker 1: UH model, as first by late adopter. Yes, do you
Speaker 1: mean before two eleven, because because that's when I adopted
Speaker 1: the smartphone. Yeah. Yeah, And as we'll see, that was
Speaker 1: that was fairly late, uh, considering when smartphones first started
Speaker 1: to hit the market. But then I was also a
Speaker 1: late adopter to cell phones in general. I was one
Speaker 1: of those curmudgeons who said, why would I need a
Speaker 1: phone so people can get in touch with me whenever?
Speaker 1: That's what answering machines are for. Uh, because get off
Speaker 1: my lawn. But I thought we'd talk about the history,
Speaker 1: and also we need to kind of define what a
Speaker 1: smartphone is in general, because that's changed over time a
Speaker 1: whole bunch, that's right. These these days, I think it's
Speaker 1: basically defined as um, something that has apps that you
Speaker 1: can download so that you can change what software is
Speaker 1: on your phone personally. Yeah, exactly, very true. And in
Speaker 1: the past that was it was more just kind of
Speaker 1: a combination of a cellphone and p d A at
Speaker 1: the same time. Yeah. Yeah, some basic features that made
Speaker 1: it more than just a device that could let you
Speaker 1: call on the go, but let you send messages in
Speaker 1: various ways or or even serve the web. So a
Speaker 1: lot of the stuff that we would we would think
Speaker 1: of as a feature phone was originally what we would
Speaker 1: call a smartphone, because a feature phone now is pretty
Speaker 1: much anything that's not a smartphone, apart from, you know,
Speaker 1: a brick that makes calls. But to really understand how
Speaker 1: smartphones evolved, um, well, we started talking about the history
Speaker 1: of it, and we realized that we kind of had
Speaker 1: to go a little further back than smartphones or cell
Speaker 1: phones or telephones because but essentially a smartphone is is
Speaker 1: it is a telephone that is mobile, and what what
Speaker 1: a mobile telephone is is technically a radio. Um, so
Speaker 1: you go all the way back to what was six
Speaker 1: Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah, that's alex as I like to
Speaker 1: call him. Yeah, he came up with this idea. He
Speaker 1: called it the electrical speech machine, and uh in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six. And before him, there had been a lot
Speaker 1: of work in physics for discovering things like the nature
Speaker 1: of electromagnetism and how that could create certain waves, and
Speaker 1: there was a there had also been development of a
Speaker 1: thing called the telegraph, which was I know, nuts, right,
Speaker 1: but I can send messages across distance, yeah, exactly, and
Speaker 1: you don't have to use a horse or smoke or
Speaker 1: a horse that's smoking. It's awesome. So yeah, the the
Speaker 1: at this point we're talking about actually transmitting voice over electricity,
Speaker 1: which was a phenomenal idea. And uh, the nice thing
Speaker 1: about this is that you're looking at these different disciplines
Speaker 1: that kind of combined to say, you know, there's probably
Speaker 1: the potential to make a wireless communications system. We've figured
Speaker 1: out how to do it by wire. We've got this
Speaker 1: other work that physicists are doing in electromagnetism and radio waves.
Speaker 1: I bet that we can figure out this this relationship
Speaker 1: between electricity voice electromagnetism, make it work in some crazy
Speaker 1: way to transmit voice across great distances without wires. And
Speaker 1: there are a few people who are thinking of crazy
Speaker 1: thoughts like that. Uh Marconi, he was one of them.
Speaker 1: Kind of big, yeah, kind of big. There was the
Speaker 1: internet Darling Tesla. Yeah yeah, when you say his name,
Speaker 1: doves fly out of the internet. Uh yeah. While he
Speaker 1: did make some amazing discoveries and was a phenomenal physicist
Speaker 1: in his day, also was a crazy, crazy man. He
Speaker 1: is his his picture is looking at us from the
Speaker 1: podcast wall right now, staring staring deeply into me and
Speaker 1: judging me. That might also be my I get a
Speaker 1: little grouchy with Tesla. Edison also very important during this
Speaker 1: time up by the way, that's your queue taboo. You
Speaker 1: cheer Tesla and you boo Edison. That how the internet works. Well,
Speaker 1: he killed elephants. He did kill elephants. That's true. He
Speaker 1: used alternating current to shock elephants to death. But we're
Speaker 1: kind of getting off base anyway. At this point, we're
Speaker 1: talking about radio. So now radio, of course plays an
Speaker 1: important part because when you get to the point of
Speaker 1: cellular telephones, you're really talking about another version of radio communication.
Speaker 1: So you've got the the development of the telephone and
Speaker 1: the development of radio all going on at the same time. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then we'll skip ahead a little bit because although
Speaker 1: there are lots and lots of things we can talk
Speaker 1: about during this time, ultimately they don't really uh inform
Speaker 1: our discussion about the history of the smartphone. I would
Speaker 1: go all the way to oh, I'm I'm actually not
Speaker 1: familiar with this, with this particular reference that ves wireless
Speaker 1: even wireless. Okay, so there's actually a clip online where
Speaker 1: you can watch this silent film. And I did not
Speaker 1: know about this until this morning. So I don't think
Speaker 1: that I'm brilliant because I put this in our notes.
Speaker 1: I just found out about it a thought it was
Speaker 1: too cool to pass up because I was looking around
Speaker 1: and someone jokingly referred to it as the first smartphone.
Speaker 1: It's a silent film that shows two women walking down
Speaker 1: the street having a conversation, or at least that's what
Speaker 1: we assume they're doing, because we can't hear them. They
Speaker 1: could be making bird noises for all I know. They
Speaker 1: come up to a fire hydrant, and as two women
Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century would do, they stop at
Speaker 1: the fire hydrant. Clearly, of course, they wrap a wire
Speaker 1: around the end of the fire hydrant and they and
Speaker 1: the other end of that wires holds up to a radio.
Speaker 1: And then there's another wire from the radio going to
Speaker 1: an umbrella, which one of the two ladies opens up
Speaker 1: and holds up into the air. And then they fiddle
Speaker 1: with some knobs on the radio that is now wired
Speaker 1: to both the umbrella and the fire hydranydrant. And then
Speaker 1: it cuts with the magic of cinema to a radio
Speaker 1: operator who is holding up a transmitter to a phonograph
Speaker 1: and plays music from the phonograph through the radio transmitter,
Speaker 1: which the two ladies on the street are apparently listening
Speaker 1: to the umbrella. And yes, yes, so this was this
Speaker 1: was what people were calling the first smartphone because it
Speaker 1: was using wireless radio technology to transmit communications exactly. I
Speaker 1: like to think of it as the first iPod commercial.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's why I put that in there, because
Speaker 1: someone jokingly referred to it as the first smartphone, which
Speaker 1: really it only had one way communication. You can only receive.
Speaker 1: There was not a transmitter, right, they didn't have a
Speaker 1: microphone waked up to it exactly. Certainly that was going
Speaker 1: to be in the sequel. Yes, yes, it was Eve's
Speaker 1: Witness to the Reckoning. Um did not yet did not
Speaker 1: do well the box office, sadly. That's why I had
Speaker 1: to put that in there, just because the clip is online,
Speaker 1: and I'll share a clip of that in our Facebook
Speaker 1: page so you guys can get a look at it
Speaker 1: because it's it's entertaining, It sounds spectacular. If this were
Speaker 1: not audio, then I would want to play it right now.
Speaker 1: Uh no, But but we we had some actual mobile
Speaker 1: call technology going on by the correct that's correct. You
Speaker 1: got a T and T and bell Labs now Bell Labs,
Speaker 1: is the research and development arm of a T and
Speaker 1: T correct and Bell Labs very much known for developments
Speaker 1: in wireless communication as well just communication technology in general.
Speaker 1: So in the nineteen forties they developed the first wireless network,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of being generous, Uh what was it?
Speaker 1: What was it like? Back in so imagine that you
Speaker 1: are in a big metropolis and your big metropolis has
Speaker 1: a wireless network that consists of a single tower with
Speaker 1: a transmitter on it, and that transmitter is capable of
Speaker 1: handling oh maybe a dozen channels of communication, so that's
Speaker 1: all it could handle at one time. So in other words,
Speaker 1: even if you had a lot of people with the handsets,
Speaker 1: you could have of them actually operated simultaneous or maybe
Speaker 1: even just six because I don't know if it was
Speaker 1: too like it was two ways, but I honestly don't
Speaker 1: know because I didn't have enough information there. But but
Speaker 1: the the first wireless call was made by a truck driver,
Speaker 1: showing that even back in the nineteen forties we were
Speaker 1: not practicing safe driving techniques. And it was a hand
Speaker 1: set like like a rotary phone. Hands do you know
Speaker 1: what a rotary phone is? Lauren? I remember rotary phones
Speaker 1: from when I was about three. Lauren's a little younger
Speaker 1: than I am, so, so the rotary phone handle, it's
Speaker 1: this giant handle, right, and it's got like a cord
Speaker 1: that goes down to the base unit of this wireless telephone.
Speaker 1: And how how large was the based unit of a
Speaker 1: wireless telephone? Well, I don't have the specific dimensions, but
Speaker 1: I can tell you it weighed eighty pounds and for
Speaker 1: our friends who used the metric systems, thirty six point
Speaker 1: three kilograms. So not exactly fit in your pocket mobile,
Speaker 1: not so much something that you want to want to
Speaker 1: take around with you, you know, I mean vacations. I
Speaker 1: assume it's camera was really crappy, Yeah, terrible. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a zero megapixel camera, right. Yeah. The only app could
Speaker 1: I could run is call this person, and that's only
Speaker 1: if you dialed it. Um. Yeah, eighty pounds. Yeah. If
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs had come out in two thousand and seven
Speaker 1: and unveiled the iPhone and it weighed eighty pounds, I
Speaker 1: doubt it would have done quite so well on the market. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not so much, but for those purposes. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: cost fifteen dollars a month to have the service which
Speaker 1: if you were to do an inflation calculator as I did,
Speaker 1: which had the latest year as eleven, that's the most
Speaker 1: recent figure, but in the fifteen dollars a month would
Speaker 1: be a hundred thirty eight dollars a month, which which actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: that I would take that today. Yeah, that's actually lower
Speaker 1: than what I'm paying. Although although I suppose that, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that that eighty pounds of lugging equipment around is
Speaker 1: maybe well, I would also be in better shape. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't need to download any physical fitness apps to my phone,
Speaker 1: because just carrying the phone would be physical fitness. Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe we need to bring back the eighty pound phones.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe this is this will solve the oats any traffic.
Speaker 1: If any of our listeners out there launch a company
Speaker 1: where you market an eighty pound smartphone, we demand at
Speaker 1: least some sort of residuals because we ain't getting rich
Speaker 1: from podcasts and folks. Also a prototype send one over.
Speaker 1: Yeah okay, So moving on, we get to nine. Now
Speaker 1: this is where we start seeing companies look into developing
Speaker 1: cellular networks. So going beyond that single transmitter model I
Speaker 1: was just talking about. Now we're looking at building the
Speaker 1: foundation that would allow people to make sell calls. Right,
Speaker 1: and by cellular, of course, we mean a telephone that
Speaker 1: can go through a network of towers and keep the
Speaker 1: signal exactly, yes, because that's a that would be an issue.
Speaker 1: If you were to move outside the broadcast range of
Speaker 1: a transmitter and a receiver, then you would drop your call.
Speaker 1: So if you have a network of these transmitters and receivers,
Speaker 1: then the theoretically you can move from one to the
Speaker 1: other and you'd be fine, but you'd have to figure
Speaker 1: out how to coordinate. Yeah, you gotta you gotta build
Speaker 1: the architecture so that the phone when it moves from
Speaker 1: one to the other, gets handed off from one tower
Speaker 1: to another tower, or a communication ceases. This is not
Speaker 1: a trivial problem, and it will take many decades of
Speaker 1: work and and lots of infrastructure goes into it. And
Speaker 1: uh yeah, and so so even though we technically had
Speaker 1: the capacity to make these calls, to make these mobile
Speaker 1: calls back in the nineties, we would not have the
Speaker 1: infrastructure to do so. I mean, I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: it started in right, Yeah, No, you're exactly right. Even today,
Speaker 1: I mean, certain parts of Atlanta we drive through and
Speaker 1: I'm just like you can you gehit that dead section?
Speaker 1: There's a section on okay, And I apologize to all
Speaker 1: the people who are going to hear the pronunciation of
Speaker 1: this street, but this is how we say it in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: Ponstall le in when you go downstall. I'm sorry, it's
Speaker 1: not pomps Own, which is what how my wife pronounces it,
Speaker 1: being from Philadelphia, she refuses to sleep in Florida. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they can't. I'm a little bit physically incapable of saying it.
Speaker 1: After after about eight years, I worked it out. It's
Speaker 1: it's tough, but yeah, there are certain dead sections. Clearly,
Speaker 1: we still have to keep building those networks out if
Speaker 1: we want to have universal coverage across the United States. Um,
Speaker 1: that sounds weird. Universal coverage across the United States Universal
Speaker 1: if it's universal, doesn't make it international anyway. Moving on, so, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're talking decades of work to build out the cellular networks,
Speaker 1: which at the at that time, you know, no one
Speaker 1: was using because there was there wasn't nothing networks, right,
Speaker 1: it was physically impossible to crazy, Yeah, and it wasn't.
Speaker 1: It wasn't in fact until the nineteen seventies that they
Speaker 1: managed to pull off that first cellular call. It was yeah,
Speaker 1: Martin Cooper. Okay, so this is a great, great story.
Speaker 1: Martin Cooper and executive with Motorola. Are you imagine this?
Speaker 1: You head up a research and development facility within Motorola. Sure, okay.
Speaker 1: You know that you have uh uh peers in the
Speaker 1: industry who are working on cellular networks at the same
Speaker 1: time that your group is working on them. Yes, the
Speaker 1: big one being Bell Labs of a T and T.
Speaker 1: You and your team managed to make a cellular network
Speaker 1: and a phone that will work on that network, and
Speaker 1: you can make a call to anyone. Who is the
Speaker 1: first person you call? My mom? I'm not sure. Well,
Speaker 1: Martin Cooper decided to call the head of the research
Speaker 1: and development team over at Bell Laboratories because the very
Speaker 1: first cell phone call was a crank call. That is amazing.
Speaker 1: Isn't that phenomenal? How many more cell phone calls would
Speaker 1: follow in that wake? Did he ask if his refrigerator
Speaker 1: wasning Prince Albert in a can? Actually I don't think
Speaker 1: he did any of that, but but yes, the famously,
Speaker 1: he very cheekily made a phone call to the two
Speaker 1: executive over at Bell Labs which was kind of tweaking
Speaker 1: their nose at the same time as having this historic
Speaker 1: moment on that phone was also a little a little clunky.
Speaker 1: It was not eighty pounds, but it was about one
Speaker 1: point seven five pounds, which is around point eight krams.
Speaker 1: And it had a cute nickname Brick, which you know, obviously,
Speaker 1: if if I saw a phone marketed as the Brick,
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking, boy, I gotta get my hands on
Speaker 1: that thing. Oh yeah, oh yeah, the eyebricks. Canna get
Speaker 1: the lead weight too, that would be awesome. So but
Speaker 1: this this obviously showed a shift in telephone technology. It
Speaker 1: would still be quite a few years before cell phones
Speaker 1: became a common thing in the consumer market, but we
Speaker 1: started to see them get adopted for advanced users, for
Speaker 1: business users probably yep. We also those first adopters, those
Speaker 1: early adopters who would like to be on the bleeding
Speaker 1: edge of technology before it's even proven. They would go
Speaker 1: out and get one. They were really expensive, they were
Speaker 1: not very um practical, but this was the beginning of
Speaker 1: that that trend. Um. Now, the next thing I have
Speaker 1: here is nineteen seventy four, and uh, ladies and gentlemen
Speaker 1: of Greek ancestry. I would like to apologize profusely for
Speaker 1: what I am about to attempt, because nineteen seventy four
Speaker 1: was when Theodore George and here we go, Paris Cavacos,
Speaker 1: that's my best guest. Paris Scovaco said, it's a Greek name,
Speaker 1: so obviously I probably have butchered it. But he patented
Speaker 1: a concept. Uh he actually he submitted the patent in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, but in seventy four he was granted
Speaker 1: the patent for a concept for what would be a
Speaker 1: or an early smartphone, and I wasn't called that at
Speaker 1: the time. Of course, it was called an apparatus for
Speaker 1: generating and transmitting digital information. Smartphone is catchier. I see,
Speaker 1: I see why that one stuck. Although I would say, Lauren,
Speaker 1: you you're familiar somewhat with the the realm of the
Speaker 1: steampunk a little bit, I would think that steampunk fans
Speaker 1: what they really need to do is just go through
Speaker 1: and look at patent titles, because every patent title is
Speaker 1: really more of a description of what the device does.
Speaker 1: And if you've ever seen anyone who creates steampunk gadgets,
Speaker 1: that's almost always what they name their stuff. It's not
Speaker 1: a simple name. It's a descriptor. It's as many words
Speaker 1: as you can possibly fit into a single phrase without
Speaker 1: losing your breath and falling over. And the word ether
Speaker 1: has to be in there somewhere. Well clearly, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean obviously it's the most important part. Also, don't forget
Speaker 1: your goggles. Uh, that's neither here nor there. Moving on,
Speaker 1: so so so in in seventy four, um um, our friend,
Speaker 1: our friend Teddy. Yeah I like that. Yes, Teddy put
Speaker 1: in this patent um and then proceeded to do absolutely
Speaker 1: nothing with it. Is that correct? Well? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it kind of just sort of languished because while the
Speaker 1: concept was there, the technology wasn't really up to task
Speaker 1: to fulfilling on that promise. Because the idea was to
Speaker 1: have this handheld device that could transmit digital information at
Speaker 1: the time in the in the handheld device would not
Speaker 1: really be able to do that efficiently. We're talking about
Speaker 1: I mean, we were in nineteen seventy four. I'm again,
Speaker 1: you would be more familiar with this because you were ancient. Um,
Speaker 1: but I was not born in seventy four. Thank you,
Speaker 1: I don't have to wait a year. But yes, yes,
Speaker 1: hand handheld devices at the time could could do not
Speaker 1: very calculating. We had some, We had some We had
Speaker 1: some really good graphics calculators first starting around the around
Speaker 1: the seventies. Yeah, Hewett Packard had some some calculators and
Speaker 1: IBM of you as well. But they were more than
Speaker 1: the size of our laptops. They were closer to that
Speaker 1: than a than a slider phone, definitely. And in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, you're also talking about this is this is
Speaker 1: right at the very bleeding edge of the personal computer.
Speaker 1: Are so a smartphone, which in a way is like
Speaker 1: a a a distant cousin of the PC that fits
Speaker 1: in your hand. Clearly, it would be unreasonable to think
Speaker 1: of something like that existing in seventy four when the
Speaker 1: actual PC still itself was not much, not really a thing.
Speaker 1: Yet you have to wait another couple of years for
Speaker 1: those to become a thing. So when when did when did? Um?
Speaker 1: I mean because one of the ancestors of smartphones had
Speaker 1: to have been p D a Personal Digital assistance which
Speaker 1: which came onto the scene in the early eighties, Is
Speaker 1: that correct? So there's this company called Scion, and that's
Speaker 1: going to become important in a little bit too. Ssion
Speaker 1: created this device called the organizer. Now, the first organizer
Speaker 1: was more of a curiosity. It was part calculator, part
Speaker 1: database manager, or part part like digital note taker. So
Speaker 1: imagine that you have a watch that also lets you
Speaker 1: type stuff in it, but you can't do anything else
Speaker 1: with the stuff, so you can make it just sits
Speaker 1: in the watch forever. Right, Yeah, you could delete it eventually.
Speaker 1: I think they had to use Actually I don't think
Speaker 1: it's this one, but there is one p d A
Speaker 1: I read about where the only way to reformat it
Speaker 1: was to bathe it an ultra violet radiation, which, of course,
Speaker 1: I mean I have one of those devices at home.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the dogs love it. I'm kidding, I'm kidding,
Speaker 1: they hate it. So yeah, the the organizer, all it
Speaker 1: was was a clock in this a way of taking notes.
Speaker 1: But you couldn't you couldn't organize it in any other way. Really,
Speaker 1: it was like you could put I could put down
Speaker 1: your name and your phone number, and then under on
Speaker 1: the next line under I might put eggs, milk, bread,
Speaker 1: you know, et cetera. And then on the next line
Speaker 1: down I might say, um, you know, write down what
Speaker 1: a person's address, And there's there's no rhyme or reason.
Speaker 1: There wasn't there was no particular operating system, right. But
Speaker 1: one just two years later they introduced the organizer too,
Speaker 1: and that one was really the very first pd eight
Speaker 1: had a lot more features that actually had allowed you
Speaker 1: to organize stuff into different categories, and it laid the
Speaker 1: groundwork for what the p d A would be over
Speaker 1: the next really the next decade and a half. P
Speaker 1: d a's, I mean they technically still exist, but mostly
Speaker 1: they've been co opted by smartphones. It's one of those
Speaker 1: many things that we have replaced in our pockets with
Speaker 1: a single We went from so we went from seventy
Speaker 1: four to eight four. What's our next jump? I think
Speaker 1: our next jump is all the way to ninety four. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'd like to take these decades people. Um, And that
Speaker 1: was that was when that was the first time that
Speaker 1: that a p d A and a cell phone really
Speaker 1: got got kind of smooshed together. Right, Yeah, So what
Speaker 1: IBM dead? It was IBM IBM took a PDA and
Speaker 1: they took a cell phone, and they put them in
Speaker 1: a room together and put on some very white music.
Speaker 1: And about nine months later, the Simon Personal Communicator came
Speaker 1: out and that's how smartphones are born. Actually that's mostly
Speaker 1: a lie, but no, they did. They did come up
Speaker 1: with a product called the Simon Personal Communicator, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it was part cell phone, part p d A. So
Speaker 1: in a way it's the kind of like the great
Speaker 1: grandfather of smartphones. And it could send facsimiles. Is that correct, Verry?
Speaker 1: What wasn't that one of the first messages that it sent.
Speaker 1: I believe during one of their their stage shows they
Speaker 1: sent a facts from one end of the stage to
Speaker 1: the other and we're like, check us out you yeah,
Speaker 1: which is at that time that was pretty exciting certainly,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's it's hard for us to remember now,
Speaker 1: but for all, remember all those you know, all those
Speaker 1: hoax emails or jokes you would get an email and
Speaker 1: then later on you would start getting them on things
Speaker 1: like Facebook. My very dear grandmother still still uses email
Speaker 1: to send them. Yeah, so you get those forwards. Back
Speaker 1: in the day, which was a Thursday, remember, uh, we
Speaker 1: used to send those via facts. They're called facts lure.
Speaker 1: Facts Laura is a type of folklore where the same
Speaker 1: sort of hoaxes and jokes would get passed around on
Speaker 1: facts as they do today. On email or through social networks,
Speaker 1: and so very important to allow people to pass on
Speaker 1: that message that Bill Gates will give them lots of
Speaker 1: money if they forward this message on which it's not
Speaker 1: true critical but but yeah, and it was, it was,
Speaker 1: I mean relatively tremendously expensive at the time, the sign
Speaker 1: and um, it was it cost it cost a thousand
Speaker 1: ninety nine dollars um by itself or a contract because
Speaker 1: even then even then didn't when they're working with Bill
Speaker 1: cell I think, um they had teamed up with Bell
Speaker 1: Seal to do this. Who wasn't entirely sure about this
Speaker 1: whole cell phone thing quite at that moment, the smartphone, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was. It was a big risk at
Speaker 1: that time. And even at that price, they still sold,
Speaker 1: they still sold quite a few, uh products. Now granted
Speaker 1: again these were going to very you know, a very
Speaker 1: specialized market because not everyone could afford a well in
Speaker 1: to day's dollars would be nearly more than sixteen hundred
Speaker 1: dollars for a phone. Sixteen hundred dollars for a phone
Speaker 1: for a phone. Yeah, but if you which is twice
Speaker 1: what I would pay for anyone contract, And of course
Speaker 1: I guess we should take this moment to also acknowledge
Speaker 1: the fact to all of our listeners overseas who are
Speaker 1: used to buying your phones without any subsidies from your
Speaker 1: cell phone carrier. We totally understand the you you pay
Speaker 1: more perfone than we do. But we're coming at it
Speaker 1: from the perspective of people in the United States who
Speaker 1: sign away two years of our lives in order to
Speaker 1: be able to buy a phone for about four dollars
Speaker 1: cheaper than what it would go for otherwise. We we
Speaker 1: have to make a blood OAF but it only costs
Speaker 1: about two hundred dollars to the phone, and somehow it
Speaker 1: works out. Yeah, there's there's usually some sort of weird
Speaker 1: ceremony involved, but two guys over there don't need to
Speaker 1: know all about that. We don't want to give away
Speaker 1: all our secrets. But so, but so, the Simon, the
Speaker 1: Simon Personal Communicator, really I kind of didn't do well.
Speaker 1: I don't think it was it was a few thousand,
Speaker 1: but you know, it was like it was tet and
Speaker 1: it was kind of a prototype. And and again the
Speaker 1: infrastructure was not prepared to handle something like that. There
Speaker 1: weren't that many places that you could use it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and for for something that was based on a
Speaker 1: concept of you can use this anywhere that wasn't really
Speaker 1: it was it was, and so I think it was
Speaker 1: off the market. It was. It was definitely one of
Speaker 1: more of a proof of concept. That's why it turned out.
Speaker 1: It turned out to be more of a proof of
Speaker 1: concept that it turned out to be a useful product
Speaker 1: on and so one because of those very things you say,
Speaker 1: because yeah, I mean if if your whole thing is
Speaker 1: this is mobile, then you better be able to use
Speaker 1: it MOBI. Yeah. Apart from like it's mobile, as long
Speaker 1: as you stay within this four square foot area of
Speaker 1: this part of the office that's adjacent to this giant window,
Speaker 1: that's not terribly useful. No no, um. But But but
Speaker 1: very soon after that, in nineties six, Palms started Yeah Palm,
Speaker 1: man boy, what a And we've done an episode about Palm,
Speaker 1: a couple of episodes about Palm and including it's a
Speaker 1: relationship with other companies. But in ninety six that's when
Speaker 1: it started to really make a name for itself in
Speaker 1: the personal Digital assistant UH market. And they released the
Speaker 1: Pilot one thousand and Pilot five thousand, and people who
Speaker 1: owned Palm p D as are some of the most
Speaker 1: passionate technology lovers I know, oh absolutely. I mean there
Speaker 1: I know people who still will talk about either their
Speaker 1: PDA or their Palm. Smartphones, like the Trio owners are like, well,
Speaker 1: they're like a mega owners. And I don't mean that
Speaker 1: in a bad way. I just mean that they are
Speaker 1: really passionate about that product. Right, Yes, absolutely, and it's
Speaker 1: it's easy to see why. I mean it was. It
Speaker 1: was very exciting at the time that the level of
Speaker 1: functionality that they were getting out of out of a
Speaker 1: thing that you could put in your pocket and carry
Speaker 1: around with you and have have access to um all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff. Man, I mean you could have all
Speaker 1: your calendar in there, you could have files, you could
Speaker 1: even run apps on these things. It was. It was
Speaker 1: a small, portable, very limited computer. Yes, go just another
Speaker 1: year and then you know, there's this company that pops
Speaker 1: up in n called HTC. Now I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you a story here, Lauren. You guys out there you
Speaker 1: can listen in if you like HTC. I had never
Speaker 1: heard of HTC because I was not into smartphones at
Speaker 1: all until I got until first, and so I didn't
Speaker 1: that's actually right. It came out in two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: but I didn't buy my until two thousand nine. So
Speaker 1: that's really remarkable that you knew that that Lauren's been stalking. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I've been listening to your other podcasts. You've talked about
Speaker 1: this before, Jonathan. Fair enough, fair enough, So HTC. I
Speaker 1: had never heard of them. I didn't realize that they had.
Speaker 1: They were first founded, and in fact, they've had a
Speaker 1: much longer association with smartphones than I was aware. When
Speaker 1: I saw the g One, I naively thought, oh, this
Speaker 1: must be like one of their first products, because I've
Speaker 1: never heard of them before. Now that was due to
Speaker 1: my ignorance, not due to HTC's UH success in the
Speaker 1: the or lack thereof in in UH in the market.
Speaker 1: In fact, we'll talk a little bit about some of
Speaker 1: their other products in a in a bit. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: HTC pops up on the scene and they become a
Speaker 1: big name, although not they don't always have a smooth
Speaker 1: sailing kind of relationship with the market either. HTC has
Speaker 1: been having some issues over the last couple of years.
Speaker 1: In fact, most most technology companies, I think are doing
Speaker 1: a tiny bit of that here and there. You found
Speaker 1: out the first use of the term smartphone. Yes. Um,
Speaker 1: that also happened in it was attached to one of
Speaker 1: Ericsson's phones, UM called the g S eight eight a
Speaker 1: k a. The Penelope. Oh it's not Penelope, not Penalope. Man,
Speaker 1: I've been saying it wrong all these years. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: this this was this was basically a concept model. I
Speaker 1: think only about two were ever produced. But um, but yes,
Speaker 1: that was the first marketing package that had the word
Speaker 1: smart and phone in conjunction. There was a space between them,
Speaker 1: so clearly there was a lot of work to be
Speaker 1: done in the marketing field. Deleting that space would take
Speaker 1: two years, two years of hard work. You thought building
Speaker 1: that cellular network was tough. Space is big yo, getting
Speaker 1: rid of it. But yeah, yeah, and and and this
Speaker 1: is this is where that the rest of our outline
Speaker 1: is extremely crunched together. It's it's if I drew a
Speaker 1: little picture and had to start making bendylines going all
Speaker 1: over the place. Well, yeah, because up to now we've
Speaker 1: been jumping like we were doing. We were doing fifty
Speaker 1: year jumps for a while, then we got down to
Speaker 1: ten year jumps. Now we're doing like two and pretty
Speaker 1: soon we've got a whole bunch of stuff happening year
Speaker 1: by year, year by year, a month by month. So, Lauren,
Speaker 1: it turns out we had a lot to say about
Speaker 1: the history of smartphones. We talk a lot. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: it turned out to be so long that we're doing
Speaker 1: something that it's not unusual for text stuff. We're splitting
Speaker 1: it into two episodes, so we're gonna leave off here,
Speaker 1: but we'll pick up in our next episode right where
Speaker 1: we left off. If you guys have topics you would
Speaker 1: like us to tackle on tech stuff, email us our
Speaker 1: addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com or contact us
Speaker 1: on Facebook or Twitter. Are handle us tech stuff, hs
Speaker 1: W and Lauren and I will talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: is its staff works dot com.