smartphone

Smart comes from Old English smeart, meaning painful or stinging — a smart blow, a smart remark. By the 17th century 'smart' had expanded to mean clever or fashionable, via the notion that a smart person stings with wit. Phone comes from Greek phōnē, voice or sound. Telephone, coined by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, combined tele- (far) and phōnē: voice at a distance. The smartphone combined the telephone's sound-transmission with intelligence.

IBM and BellSouth launched the Simon Personal Communicator on August 16, 1994. It had a touchscreen, email, calendar, and address book — twelve years before the iPhone. The word 'smartphone' appeared in a 1992 AT&T advertisement for a product that would eventually become the Simon. The concept was sound; the execution was ahead of its time. The Simon weighed 510 grams and its battery lasted one hour.

Nokia dominated the early smartphone market with the 9000 Communicator in 1996 and the N95 in 2007. But it was Apple's iPhone, released January 9, 2007, that established the modern form: glass screen, no physical keyboard, one button. Within five years, smartphones became the most rapidly adopted consumer technology in history. By 2023 there were more smartphones on Earth than people.

The smartphone is now the primary computer for billions of people who have never owned a desktop. In many developing nations, the smartphone was the first computer, the first internet connection, the first bank account. A word coined for a $899 niche gadget in 1992 now names the most consequential piece of consumer technology in human history.