When did our Smartphone become a Smartphone?
We all have a Smartphone in our pockets or purses. We know it’s a Smartphone, we know it’s an indispensable (sometimes frustratingly so) part of our lives. I’m going to use the recent launch of my new website for Ocreati Advisors to get back to telling some stories on about the evolution of the Global Wireless Ecosystem. This is my first installment, trying to figure out how the wireless industry coalesced around the term “smartphone” for what are now billions of smartphones in use around the world.
We can Google the history of Smartphones and find the dates, facts, and figures of how Smartphones evolved. But WHY is it a called Smartphone? Why is the CATEGORY called “Smartphones”? Why is it called THAT name, and not another? I can talk about that, because I was there, and some of this is my fault. Sorry.
I started thinking about this recently, when my wife and I did a short holiday trip from San Diego to Los Angeles. One of our first visits was to the Peterson Automotive Museum in LA. An amazing place, hundreds of vintage and exotic cars, all with histories and stories.
Today, if we own a “car” it’s clear in our heads that it’s a “car”, or an “automobile”. There are subcategories like “SUV’s”, or “Convertibles” or “Pickup trucks” or “Minivans”, but they are all still cars.
Stating the obvious, going back to the late 1800’s, the four-wheel vehicles that folks got around in were “carriages” pulled by horses. Heck, it’s 2021, and the main metric of power of our cars is still bizarrely “horsepower”. But in the basement of the Peterson Museum, are the first cars called “Cars” or “Automobiles”? NOPE. They are “Horseless Carriages”.
The picture above at the Peterson Museum has a “horseless carriage” license, a plate available today to California cars from before 1923. But before then? Early on, there was the Steam Carriage, and another variant called the The Obedient. To keep people from getting edgy about a no-horse carriage, how about a patent for the Horsey Horseless? Or for you Prius owners out there, how about the Armstrong Phaeton which was the first Hybrid Electric, built back in 1896! Where “phaeton” meant “light open wheeled carriage”.
When I was running global marketing for Qualcomm in the Late 1990’s, we had the same problem. There was the beginnings of data in the network and devices, but it was still lame. The Qualcomm Q Phone launched in March 1997 and had rudiments of wireless data…but had a 4-Line, 12 character display! But it was still a “palm sized phone”, and looked like THIS. One of the ads touted it as “email, pager, and stock quotes too”. Smarter? Ahead of it’s time at the time? Yes, but a Smartphone, not yet.
So, it’s 1997 and a few folks had tried Data devices, there were Blackberries, Palm Pilots by the millions, Nokia introduced The Communicator in 1996, and a few folks had an Apple Newton (I did, LoL). Yet these devices were largely called Personal Digital Assistants, not Smartphones. So where the heck did the term “Smartphones” come from?
Back in the heyday of when Qualcomm was manufacturing mobile phone, it launched their flagship Q Phone in March of 1997. Cell phones were getting smarter, and it was clear that the category needed a name. This is where it gets tricky though, and I’d challenge folks to send me their own links and/or recollections. At Qualcomm, we began wrestling with “what the heck should we call these things”, and had a ton of meetings trying to figure that out. The devices were clearly not horseless carriages, but they did clear secure voice calls, slow/limited data, and SMS/paging (which was still a BIG deal back then) without messing up the streets.
At least for Qualcomm, we knew that Data was coming, and coming in a big way. At that point, Qualcomm developing the core wireless technologies (along with myriad other companies around the world), making the phones, network equipment, as well as chips to go in other OEM’s devices (which the company still does by the bijillions). And the Q Phone was the flagship to start to lay claim to that evolution. We started wrestling on what these things should be called…lots of meetings among execs, marketing, product management leading into what for my group was the upcoming launch of Qualcomm’s first National Ad campaign, using nascent wireless data and the Flagship Q phone as a differentiator.
So, on June 17th, 1997, almost 10 years to the day before the first launch of the first Apple iPhone, a Qualcomm press release announced the “why” behind Qualcomm’s first National Ad campaign: “This TV ad’s emphasis on data-related services is part of Qualcomm’s approach for each of our phones to ultimately be a ‘smart’ phone. Our palmsized ‘Q’ phone is designed to have capabilities which can grow with our customers,” Belk said.
I’ve been doing hunting to see how the industry triangulated around the term “smartphone”. The closest I could find was that Ericsson, sometime in 1997, announced their concept data phone GS88 as a ‘smart-phone’, with a hypen, but not sure when in 1997 this was. Since my quote above is in June, 1997, sort of a 50/50 shot the GS88 was earlier!
So, a challenge to folks out there who worked at or still work at the likes of Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and elsewhere. Two things are seemingly clear, first, we all have our smartphones today, and the evolution to the term Smartphone seemed to have happened in 1997…but when did it lose the “smart” phone, and the hyphen? Was there someone or some company that used “smartphone” before, during or after this timeframe, or did we all just sort of coalesce around the same term? Anybody out there, weigh in, or forward to someone who can weigh in! Or who has other interesting tales to tell around that era in wireless.
We now had the PR concept and NAME for Smartphones, one that obviously endured, but Qualcomm didn’t ship many Q phones in 1997, and Ericsson only shipped small quantities of the GS88.
Why was that the case, and what changed in the 2–3 years following? Stay Tuned for Chapter 2! And please, stay in touch!!!
Jeff