What if I told you that there was a cell phone in 1995 that could make phone calls, check email, send/receive faxes, do calendaring, had the ability add in peripheral devices and had a full touchscreen?

There was. It was called the Simon PDA from IBM and Bellsouth.

Don’t believe me? Watch the first one minute and 15 seconds of this video.

The price for this foreboding tank back then? $899.

Like the iPhone, Simon has no physical function buttons to speak of as it was a true touchscreen.

Why wasn’t it more popular? The design of it was awful. It was big, huge and heavy. Simon looked more like an 1980s cell phone than a mid-1990s one. The battery life was also pathetic compared to other flip-style phones of the time.

The Simon is a very early version of the smartphone. It was a tiny (for the time) DOS PC that ran at 16MHz with a single-chip design. The DOS used was called ROM-DOS. 2MB of Flash memory was onboard that stored all the apps it had. More about Simon can be read here.

A super-big photo of the Simon.

For anybody that says Apple was first with a fully touchscreen-enabled smartphone, that’s flat-out false. IBM/Bellsouth was.

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