It's interesting how many false starts we had before the smartphone became ubiquitous. We had the Simon, Palm, then Nokia and Sony-Ericsson both with Symbian and different UI layers, WAP, various Windows CE devices, Blackberry pager descendants, and I probably missed a lot of them.
pavlov 5 minutes ago [-]
Japan's i-mode was a HTML-based smart mobile service that was very popular from 1999 to 2008:
(Though at the time of this comment the Internet Archive seems to be down so if the video doesn't load, that's why.)
jansan 4 minutes ago [-]
Isn't it interesting that some companies like IBM and Siemens completely lost the ability or will to produce end user products? (Before you answer that your kitchen appliance is from Siemens, let me tell you it is not. It's from Bosch who put a Siemens sticker on it).
I love the pace of the commercial btw, which could also have been done by Vsauce.
Rendered at 10:14:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
At 80M subscribers, it was probably the most popular way in the world to access mobile internet pre-iPhone.
https://youtu.be/lkg4EAK0Y30
I love stuff like this. There's a great episode of the 90s PBS show Computer Chronicles with a ton of these:
https://computerchronicles.tv/#episode/1103
(Though at the time of this comment the Internet Archive seems to be down so if the video doesn't load, that's why.)
I love the pace of the commercial btw, which could also have been done by Vsauce.