PDA
– Resistive Touchscreen
– Apple Newton
– Palm Pilot
– Windows Mobile
The Smartphone
– IBM Simon
– Geos
– Nokia Communicator
– Symbian OS
– Blackberry
The iPhone
– Apple iPod
– Three Products in One
– Cooperation mit Cingular
Android
– Unix
– Linux
– Open Handset Alliance

Development of the Smartphone

Before we discuss the smartphone, let’s look at a device that was popular around the turn of the millennium, especially in the business world. It was a small “organizer” and was called a Personal Digital Assistant. In a sense, this is where the smartphone evolved from.

Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

In the 1980s, businessmen used small ring binders to organize themselves. The following information was typically kept there.

• Events
• Addresses and telephone numbers
• To do lists
• Notes

At the same time, such information was also used and stored on the PC. However, this was not mobile. Either you kept the data in both spaces or you concentrated on the ring binder.

Due to advances in electronics, especially in the area of programmable calculators, a new mobile device was invented that was supposed to take over the tasks of the “ring binder”. It should be a pocket device and should be used anywhere.

The problem, of course, was that you needed a screen and also a keyboard. However, the screen had to be so large that it took up practically the entire surface of the device. How could you enter and retrieve data? The solution was a touch-sensitive screen.

RESISTIVE TOUCHSCREEN

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, attempts were made to expand screens so that you could touch certain displayed objects with a pen in order to carry out actions. The first solutions consisted of a network of light barriers that were arranged in a matrix over a (tube) screen.

In the late 1980s, so-called resistive touch-sensitive screens were developed. For this purpose, two transparent films are used, which are separated from each other at a well-defined distance and lie on top of each other. These films are conductive and have resistance across their surface. The foils can be connected by applying pressure, for example with a pen. Depending on the distance to the side, different resistances arise from the edges of the foils. These resistances can be measured individually by applying voltage to the edges of the foils and the exact position of the pressure point can be measured.

A touchscreen consists of the actual display and the transparent pair of foils. The display was a medium resolution LCD display in the early 1990s. You could also use your finger instead of a pen. However, this made the input quite imprecise, so initially only pens were used for touch sensitive screens.

Apple Newton

We already touched on Apple’s development when it came to the ARM processor. As described, Apple was already working on a PDA at the end of the 1980s and needed a suitable, energy-saving processor for this. The result of this development was the Apple Newton. Actually, Newton was the name of the innovative operating system while the device was called Message PAD, but Newton had prevailed in the public eye. The Newton practically only consisted of a touch-sensitive display, slightly smaller than A5 size. It had an LCD display with a resolution of 336 × 320 dots. Market launch was in 1993. It was quite heavy with 400 g and actually too big for a pocket device. But it was very innovative for the time. Above all, the intuitive menu navigation using the pen.

The weak point (as with other PDAs that were to follow) was the input of text. Apple decided to use “handwriting recognition”, which, however, did not work well and contributed to the fact that the Newton received a lot of attention but was not commercially successful, especially since the device was also very expensive.

Steve Jobs was still involved in the development of the Newton but left Apple when the Newton got on the market in 1993. When he returned to Apple he stopped the Newton product line. But he learned from this product, that simplicity of such a device is a key element for its success.

Palm Pilot

What Apple Newton couldn’t do, a company called Palm did in 1996. An inexpensive little PDA for the mass market.

Palm was a typical start-up from 1992, founded in Silicon Valley. The founders focused on software for PDA’s and developed a device called Zoomer in collaboration with Casio in Japan. This was similar to Apple’s Newton and also not very successful. Therefore, the founders of Palm decided not to create a PC replacement with their PDA, but rather a PC supplement. The idea was to synchronize data stored on the PC, such as appointments and addresses, with the PDA via SW and a data interface. There was also a simple input field in which characters could be entered with a pen. When the device was fully developed, Palm was swallowed up by the company US Robotics, but continued to sell the PDA under Palm, as Palm Pilot.

From the outset, the Palm Pilot was sized to fit comfortably in a shirt pocket (120x80x18mm) and weighed just 140g. It had a screen resolution of 160×160 pixels. This made it far more mobile than Apple’s Newton. With a special software, the Palm could be synchronized with the PC software. This usually happened automatically when you put the Palm in its charging cradle that was connected to the PC. The Palm was powered by a 68328 CPU from Motorola. This processor ran the PalmOS operating system.

The Palm Pilot became one of the most successful business gadgets at the end of the 1990s, especially in the USA. It was also affordable and chic for ordinary business and private individuals. In 2000, Palm had over 70% market share in the PDA business.

Windows Mobile

Despite the success of the Palm Pilot series, the idea of creating a “pocket PC”, i.e. a PDA that at least had reduced PC functionality, was not completely abandoned. The driving companies behind this development were Compac, which created corresponding PDA hardware with the iPAC series, and Microsoft, which released a special version of their Windows operating system: Windows Mobile.

The first successful device was the 3600 series, which was released in 2002. It had a color screen with 4096 colors and a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. Memory was still very limited but could be expanded with an external FLASH card.

Windows Mobile (originally Pocket PC) was a slimmed-down version of Windows CE, an operating system for small devices and industrial applications (CE such as compact, embedded). Windows hoped this would give it access to the mobile PDA market but also to future mobile phones. It consisted of an interface that was very similar to the Windows operating system but was controlled with a pen instead of a mouse. It also included rudimentary versions of Office tools i.e. Word, Excel and Power Point. Games and MP3 players were also interesting for the user.

The Pocket PCs with Windows Mobile were partially successful. They didn’t reach Palm Pilot’s user numbers. Many applications remained gimmicky and not very productive.

A key achievement of the iPAC was that they were the first PDAs to integrate the new Wireless LAN standard. It was therefore possible for the first time to access the Internet with a PDA. This led to the first overlap with cell phones regarding mobile communication.

The Smartphone

We have already discussed the feature phone, i.e. a mobile phone that, over time, has included more and more useful functionality outside of the actual phone call. This device remained primarily a telephone, i.e. it had a telephone keypad and a display with some navigation buttons.

At the same time, a new type of telephone was developed. This was characterized by the fact that it was designed from the start to do more than just make telephone calls. Basically, these devices were more like PDAs, i.e. small PCs or PC supplements that could also make telephone calls as an additional function. Like PDAs, these devices were characterized by a large touch-sensitive display and had a sophisticated user interface (Man Machine Interface: MMI), which required a special processor and an operating system. These devices were later called smartphones.

IBM Simon

At the beginning of the 1990s, IBM was also (still) working on mobile devices. In parallel to Apple and Palm, they developed a HW and, above all, a SW for a PDA. The HW was created in collaboration with Mitsubishi Electric from Japan. The processor was an 8086 architecture from Intel (but built by NEC), which had already proven itself in PCs. However, in contrast to the ARM, the 8086 was actually not well suited for mobile applications because it consumed too much power. The processor ran an operating system similar to DOS, which was enhanced with a graphical interface to make it user-friendly.

The corresponding PDA was called Simon and came onto the market in 1994. It had an elongated touch-sensitive display with a resolution of 160 × 293 pixels. It was operated with a pen. Overall, the phone was quite a chunk, with a weight of 500g. Quite comparable to an early Motorola phone. But it had practically no buttons and consisted only of a display. It had the usual functions such as calendar, notes, to-do list and addresses. But what made it different from other PDAs: It was also a cell phone. It was only available for the AMPS standard, which was already somewhat outdated in 1994. Not only could Simon make phone calls, it could even send and receive faxes and emails.

In the end, the Simon Person Communicator wasn’t very successful and was probably a little ahead of its time. Bell South only sold 50,000 units before they took it off the market. A successor was not built. Today the Simon is considered the first smartphone in the world.

GEOS

In 1990, IBM compatible PCs with an Intel 80×86 architecture ran under the MS DOS operating system. It did not have a graphical user interface like other PCs such as the Apple Macintosh already had. It wasn’t until 1990 that Microsoft began introducing a graphical interface with Windows.

During this time, software packages were created that allowed a graphical interface to run on DOS. One of these software was called PC/GEOS (Personal Computer/Graphical Environment Object System). It was a slim system and even ran on PCs that were manufactured well before 1990. Later versions of GEOS even ran on home computers like the Commodore64.

In 1992 a special version of GEOS was released which was developed specifically for PDA’s. These also ran on an 80×86 architecture. Since PDAs, as we have already discussed, were operated with pens instead of a mouse, the operating system was called PEN/GEOS. A small palm-sized PDA with a Querty keyboard, the HP OmniGo 100 was one of the first devices with this operating system.

In 1995 a special version of the HP PDA, the HP OmniGo 700LX, was released. It had a shell in which a Nokia 2110 cell phone fitted in.

This meant that a PDA was more or less firmly connected to a cell phone and you could establish connections with the PDA.

Nokia Communicator

The OmniGo 700LX was created in collaboration with Nokia. It was only logical that this should result in an integrated product which Nokia called the Communicator.

The Nokia Communicator 9000 was presented at CeBIT in 1996.

GEOS was the first operating system in Nokias Communicator. It was not a development of Nokia.

Like the HP OmniGo, the Communicator ran on an 80×86 architecture with a ROM-DOS and PIN/Geos operating system. The Communicator was way ahead of its time. He could send and receive emails and send and receive faxes and he had an HTML capable web browser. In addition, of course, it had the usual PDA functions such as address book management and calendar management.

The Communicator won awards and received a lot of attention. However, it was very expensive and probably not a commercial success.

Symbian OS

Nokia wasn’t the only one working on its first smartphones since the mid-1990s. Motorola, Ericsson and Sony were also working on corresponding products. It quickly became clear that, as in the PC industry, a uniform operating system was needed. An operating system that should not have any dependencies on Microsoft. PIN/Geos was also half based on MS-DOS. Above all, all telephone manufacturers and some PDA manufacturers did not want to dominate or even have a monopoly on an operating system like Microsoft had on the PC market.

In June 1998, a company called Symbian was founded by Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Sony and the PDA manufacturer Psion. The task was to develop and maintain an operating system for smartphones.

Symbian soon became the dominant operating system for smartphones over the next few years. Almost every major manufacturer used Symbian for their smartphones. Thus, for a long time, Microsoft was unable to gain market share in the smartphone market.

In 2000, Ericsson came out with the R380 smartphone. This ran with Symbian OS. Externally it resembled a normal (small) cell phone. However, folding down the keyboard revealed a large touch-sensitive screen. It was therefore a successful version of the IBM Simon which had come onto the market six years earlier.

Blackberry

The Canadian company Research in Motion (RIM) originally developed pagers, especially two-way pagers, at the end of the 1990s. Pagers were simple call systems. Initially they only showed the recipient a number that should be called. Later, pager systems could also receive and send arbitrary messages. RIM built devices with a display and a QUERTY keyboard for entering messages.

In 2003, RIM expanded its product portfolio with a device they called the Blackberry, which could log into cellular networks (starting with GSM). The focus was always on data. In this case, primarily via email. RIM had special servers with which the Blackberries could be synchronized with the company’s email systems (or private email). This meant you had access to email anytime, anywhere and, above all, quickly.

The first successful product was the Blackberry 6210. It had a significantly different form factor than previous cell phones and smartphones. It was wider, allowing for a QWERTY keyboard under the screen. This made it possible to hold the device with both hands and “type” with both thumbs. Navigation was not done with a pen but with a jog dial on the side of the device.

The Blackberry had GPRS access and also had an HTML capable web browser. An ARM processor ran its own operating system called Blackberry OS. The Blackberry 6210 was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 50 most influential gadgets of all time.

From 2003 onwards, the Blackberry changed the smartphone market forever. It had 50% market share of smartphones in the US in the noughties. Above all, it shaped the business world. At the beginning of the noughties, business travelers typically had to find a telephone connection in order to connect a laptop PC to the Internet. Then it took a while for the PC to dial in and download the latest emails from the server. With a Blackberry, this all happened automatically over the radio. The emails on the Blackberry were always up to date and emails could be replied to immediately. What’s more, Blackberry even offered a messenger service that allowed users to send messages to each other. Soon you could see business travelers everywhere at train stations and airports, staring at their Blackberries to check the latest emails. This ushered in the age of smartphones.

The iPhone

Technology Convergence

At the beginning of the noughties there were many new mobile digital devices that were initially developed independently.

• Digital camera
• MP3 players
• Personal digital assistant
• Pocket PC
• Digital video recorders
• GPS receiver
• Mobile games
• Mobile phones

Many of these functions have been combined, especially with the mobile phone.

It was foreseeable that eventually all technologies would be integrated into a single mobile device. This is called technology convergence. For many companies, this was a threat to their business.

Apple iPod

One manager who saw this threat was Steve Jobs, the founder and CEO of Apple. Apple was focused on PCs until the turn of the century (apart from the Newton, which was unsuccessful and was marketed in Steve Jobs‘ absence).

Steve Job was interested in the new MP3 players that had appeared on the market, but he considered them completely worthless because they could not store enough music and were difficult to use. Coincidentally, a manager at Apple named Jon Rubinstein was introduced to a new disc drive at Toshiba. It was only 1.8 inches tall and could store an incredible 5 GB. So, with such a disc drive, it was possible to store 1000 songs and it would fit in a portable device.

It was also beneficial for Apple that they had developed a special serial interface called FireWire, which was much faster than the available USB interface. So an MP3 player was developed which came onto the market in 2001. In addition to the large memory and the FireWire interface, it also had a very well-made user interface with a wheel and a display. This made it very easy to find and play songs. There were also playlists which specified the sequence of songs. Apple called the player the iPod.

iPod was linked to a computer program called iTunes. This program managed songs and created playlists. The iPod automatically synced with iTunes when connected to the PC. But this wasn’t enough for Steve Jobs. He managed to convince the entire music industry to offer their music in the form of MP3 files via an Apple portal called the iTunes Store. This was quite a gamble, since the users of the iTune Store had to pay around 1$ per song. But it was also possible to buy just one song and not complete albums which was attractive. The alternative would be to get illegal copies of the songs on the „black market“.

The iPod was a colossal success for Apple and made it the absolute leader in the MP3 market. Design and operation of the iPod made users willing to spend a lot of money, including on the songs they could download from the iTunes Store. Apple made a lot of money from this business. In the mid-noughties, almost 50% of Apple’s revenue came from the music business. Apple also shaped a new genre in the market: the lifestyle product, devices that are not only useful but also “classy”. Devices that you don’t want to own just because of their function but because they were great.

Steve Jobs now looked with concern at the mobile phone industry and its devices, which were becoming more and more powerful. It was clear (and as we described in the Feature Phone section) that they could also be used as MP3 players. Why should anyone use a cell phone and an MP3 player at the same time when they could be combined sensibly. So Apple was almost forced to enter the mobile phone business to continue the iPod business.

Apple initially tried to cooperate with Motorola to make iTunes usable for a Motorola phone. But the result was a failure because the Motorola phone was ugly and difficult to use. So Steve Jobs decided to develop a smartphone himself. However, this smartphone should be significantly different than previous smartphones such as Blackberry or Palm Trio or Communicator series from Nokia. This was always about a compromise between a sufficiently large display and a keyboard, which should preferably be a QERTY keyboard. Apple decided to eliminate the keyboard completely and focus on the display.

For this purpose, Apple introduced three new technologies.

• Multi-touch display
• Gesture control
• Distance sensors

Three products in one

When Apple and Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at the beginning of 2007, they weren’t talking about a phone per se. It was three products in one:

• An iPod
• A (new) telephone
• A device to access the Internet

It was actually a highly miniaturized PC with many applications including a “telephone application”. Of course, miniaturizing a PC in this way was nothing new. The latest generation of PDAs were exactly this. But they failed because the electronics could be made very small, but not the keyboard and screen. The smartphones still worked with tiny QWERTY keyboards and various menu buttons but it had its limits. The mouse couldn’t really be replaced with a pen on the display either.

Apple therefore relied on a revolutionary new user interface (MMI) without buttons (except for a single home button). For this they needed a multi-touch display. Due to their long research and studies, not least on gesture input, they managed to build an MMI that even children could use. One feature of the iPhone in particular worked very well and that was the internet browser. They used the Safari browser from their PC, with practically no compromises. So it was actually really possible to surf the Internet.

It can be said that the iPhone was the first mobile device that was easy to use. It was more than that, it wasn’t just easy, it was fun to use. Even people who never wanted to use a smartphone or PDA before because it was too complex loved it. Right from the start it was a “live style product” that people definitely wanted to have.

Cooperation with Cingular

The largest mobile network operator in the USA at the time of the iPhone’s introduction was Cingular Wireless, which was swallowed up by AT&T that same year. Cingular operated a GSM-based mobile network in the USA. Competitor Verizon Wireless operated Qualcomm’s CDMA. However, Steve Jobs believed in GSM because he could sell a GSM based phone worldwide. He therefore began negotiating with Cingular in 2005.

The major network operators, whether in the USA or Europe, were the “owners” of the mobile phone business. They determined which devices were allowed to be operated in their network. If they didn’t like a mobile device, they could exclude it from their network because the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identification) could identify every device on the network. It was therefore essential to work with the mobile network operators.

The mobile network operators also saw themselves as the “owners” of the applications that were operated over their networks. For example, they did not allow answering machines to be operated in the end device like in the landline network. Instead, answering machines were offered as a service on the network in order to generate more revenue because users had to call their answering machines and thereby pay for the calls. Likewise, they wanted to control internet usage if possible.

For example, Vodafone invented a mobile Internet service provider called Vodafone Life, which offered special information for its customers. What the mobile network operators didn’t want to do was simply provide an internet connection (a dumb pipe).

However, this was not what customers were used to in their internet experience. They wanted free access to the Internet like they were used to from their DSL providers. The mobile network operators had invested in access to the Internet, provided it but at the same time only wanted to use it for themselves. Therfore data traffic stagnated until 2008. Email services worked and were used but did not generate much data traffic. Photo and video exchange generated more data traffic but was too expensive because it was controlled by the mobile phone operators.

In long negotiations over 18 months, Steve Jobs actually managed to convince Cingular that if they introduced an iPhone they could generate significantly more profits from their iPhone customers. Not only that, he even managed to get $10 per iPhone user „per month“ from Cingular. It was unbelievable that the mobile network operators should also hand over money. Nevertheless, the deal went through.

The iPhone and its deal with Cingular/AT&T changed the mobile phone business. An industry like the mobile phone industry always needs growth. Since the early 1990s, this growth has been generated by winning more and more subscriber. This in turn happened primarily through cheap telephones. Since the beginning of the new century, this growth has become more difficult. Not only the price but also the performance of the cell phones became important. Ultimately, however, the market was saturated. There was no longer any growth for telephone calls (voice). The mobile phone providers were only able to grow at the expense of their competitors. The hope that applications such as video telephony would become common did not come true. Not even sending photos could be enforced. Stagnation occurred.

Cingular was the first to be convinced that they needed to share the data business with others. This changed the mobile phone industry. In the future, business was no longer focused voice services, but on data services and the speed of data services. Soon mobile network operators were no longer selling telephone minutes, but rather data volumes.

At the end of the naughties it became more important for the operators to sell data volume rather than phone minutes.

Android

Android was based on an operating system called Linux with was based on the operating system called UNIX.

UNIX

In the early days of computers, there were only single task operating systems. This means that only one user could access the computer’s elements, especially its files. As early as the 1960s, there were initiatives called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) to create an operating system that allowed multiple users in parallel. This project failed primarily due to the performance of the systems at the time. Some developers at Bell Laboratories were not dissuaded by this failure and managed to develop a multi-user system that ran in 1971 on a PDP 11 from Digital Equipment, a popular minicomputer of the time. They called it “UNiplexed Information and Computing Service” (UNICS), based on Multics. This later became UNIX.

UNIX proved to be a powerful and efficient operating system. However, Bell Labs or its parent AT&T could not market it because they were not allowed to work in the computer business for antitrust reasons. Therefore, Bell Labs decided to make the UNIX sources available to universities free of charge so that UNIX could be further developed.

LINUX

Linus Torvalds was a computer science student from Finland. For his work at the university he needed a terminal emulator for his PC. A terminal is actually just an input device for a central computer and runs on its own hardware. It is possible to imitate such a device on a PC. However, you have to work directly with the hardware, practically on the lowest software layer. Torvalds used a small system called MIMIXs, which was based on UNIX, and a GNU C compiler, a programming tool that allows access to the PC’s resources.

Eventually, Torvalds realized that the system he was programming could do more than just emulate a terminal. It was a small operating system in itself and he began to expand it accordingly. It was not a complete operating system but the core of it (kernel). Torvald first considered whether he should request a license for this system. However, he dropped this idea and offered his kernel license-free under GNU. The system was called LINUX. After his name Linus and the X for UNIX origin.

Open Handset Alliance

In 2003 a new start-up company was founded in Silicon Valley. Its name was Android Inc. It was founded by an engineer named Andrew (Andy) Rubin. Rubin already had experience in developing PDAs and their software. He works at Apple and in an Apple spin-off called General Magic, which tried to develop an operating system for PDAs. However, this company was not successful and could not establish itself. With Android, Rubin wanted to try again to enter the market for small operating systems. He originally wanted to focus on the digital camera market but soon realized that the market was too small for this and took a step towards mobile phones. He was in talks with Samsung and HTC, a Taiwanese company that started making smartphones.

Android was Rubin’s nickname, given to him by his colleagues when he was still working at Apple. He loved robots or androids and his name Andy R was already close to android. So he chose this name for his new company.

Google became aware of Android in 2005 and bought the company. Rubin and his small but very competent team were able to continue working on an operating system for cell phones, which was henceforth called Android. Android was built on a LINUX kernel and was therefore based on license-free software. Android focused on the common smartphones of its time. When the iPhone came out, however, it had to be significantly changed and improved to meet the new demands of multi-touch screens.

Google had no plans to get into the mobile phone business or license Android. It should be available to everyone as royalty-free software. For this purpose, at the end of 2007 they founded an organization with well-known mobile device manufacturers and mobile operators, the Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

The first device that came onto the market with Android shortly after the OHA was founded was a smartphone with a classic QWERTY keyboard. It was made by HTC and called HTC Dream. It took another year before both HTC and Samsung released a smartphone without a QWERTY keyboard in 2009 that came close to the functionality of an iPhone. The triumph of the Android operating system began, especially through Samsung with its Galaxy series.