smartphone

 

Devices that combined telephony and computing were first conceptualized by Theodore Paraskevakos in 1971 and patented in 1974, and were offered for sale beginning in 1993. He was the first to introduce the concepts of intelligence, data processing and visual display screens into telephones which gave rise to the "smartphone." In 1971, Paraskevakos, working with Boeing in Huntsville, Alabama, demonstrated a transmitter and receiver that provided additional ways to communicate with remote equipment, however it did not yet have general purpose PDA applications in a wireless device typical of smartphones. They were installed at Peoples' Telephone Company in Leesburg, Alabama and were demonstrated to several telephone companies. The original and historic working models are still in the possession of Paraskevakos.

The first mobile phone to incorporate PDA features was an IBM prototype developed in 1992 and demonstrated that year at the COMDEX computer industry trade show. A refined version of the product was marketed to consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator. The Simon was the first cellular device that can be properly referred to as a "smartphone", although it was not called that in 1994.^[7][8][9] In addition to its ability to make and receive cellular phone calls, Simon was able to send and receive faxes and emails and included several other apps like address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, and note pad through its touch screen display. Simon is the first smartphone to be incorporated with the features of a PDA.
The term "smart phone" first appeared in print in 1995, for describing AT&T's "PhoneWriter Communicator" as a "smart phone"