A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones

Palm Computing, then a division of US Robotics, launched the Pilot 1000 (128 KB, US$299) and the Pilot 5000 (512 KB, US$369) in 1996. After the Apple Newton and other oversized PDAs failed in the market, Palm bet on three things: a shirt-pocket form factor, HotSync synchronisation with the PC, and the Graffiti handwriting input system. With a stylus-driven resistive touchscreen, a bespoke OS, and weeks of life on a pair of AAA batteries, Palm passed one million units within eighteen months of launch and effectively owned the PDA category — 68% of the worldwide market in 1998, by IDC's count. It set the template for later smartphone UIs, the home-screen grid, and the desktop-sync culture.

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On 19 January 1999, the Canadian firm Research In Motion (RIM) launched the BlackBerry 850. A two-way pager form factor with a thumb-typed hardware QWERTY keyboard and push email (immediate, encrypted server-to-device delivery), it became the standard tool of US corporate executives, lawyers, and Wall Street. At its peak in 2012 it counted about eighty million subscribers worldwide. President Obama's reluctance to give up his BlackBerry on inauguration became the emblem of the 2000s 'corporate smartphone'. Pushed back by the iPhone and Android wave from 2007, RIM exited its own handset business in 2016 and turned the brand into a licensing operation.

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On 22 February 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode: a dedicated browser, a corpus of official sites written in cHTML (compact HTML), a JPY 300 monthly service fee with traffic charged by the packet rather than the minute, and an official portal curated by DoCoMo. It was the world's first mass-market mobile-internet platform. Subscribers passed twenty million within three years and peaked at about forty-nine million contracts in July 2010. Ringtones, emoji, mobile games — a great deal of the mobile-internet culture that would later be exported worldwide began here. On 31 March 2026, i-mode shut down alongside 3G FOMA, closing twenty-seven years of operation.

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On 26 June 2002, Nokia launched the Nokia 7650 — the first mass-produced device running Symbian OS on the Series 60 (later S60) platform, and Nokia's first camera phone. With a slide-up body, a 176×208-pixel colour screen, GPRS data, and open Symbian application execution, Nokia established the template for what would later be called the smartphone. Symbian's share of the global smartphone OS market peaked in 2006 at close to seven-tenths (reported between 67% and 73%), passing 100 million cumulative devices that November; the 250-millionth shipped in July 2009. Then the iPhone and Android arrived; Nokia collapsed, sold the handset business to Microsoft in April 2014, and Microsoft sold the feature-phone business on to FIH Mobile and HMD Global in May 2016, ending the lineage.

Related organizations

Microsoft Corporation

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Samsung Electronics launched the Galaxy S (GT-I9000) on 4 June 2010, starting in Singapore and rolling out across Europe, with the United States following from later that summer. A 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 (Hummingbird) SoC, Android 2.1 Eclair (later updated to 2.3) — Samsung's first serious Android flagship sold ten million units worldwide in about seven months. The S line has continued almost annually since, reaching the Galaxy S26 in 2026, with cumulative S-series sales running to several hundred million units. Through the patent litigation with Apple from 2011 (settled in 2018) and the Galaxy Note 7 fires of 2016, Samsung has held the world's largest annual smartphone shipment number in most years since 2011 — with Apple taking the annual crown in 2023 and again in 2025.

Related organizations

Google · Apple Inc.

Related terms

OLED (Organic LED)

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