Executive Computer: Mother of All Markets or Pipe Dream Driven by Greed? (1992)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Apple: "[..] John Sculley, the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., who says these personal communicators could be 'the mother of all markets.'"
Intel: "[..] Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, [..] He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is 'a pipe dream driven by greed.'"
Also,
> Once in the meeting, the executive could take notes on the device, and even order pizza for the group using a combination of custom electronic forms and wireless fax
Close enough :P
Mobile phones weren't very far along at all. PDA's (personal digital assistants) on the other hand were slow, clunky, had hard to read screens and were expensive, but if we transported a 20 year old back in time they'd definitely recognize it as a primitive mobile phone. They gained actual phone functionality 5-10 years later.
One of apples big innovations was to call them phones instead of PDA's, but when you include PDA's (including the apple newton) the evolutionary history is much more obvious.
I changed to a Communicator, and the keyboard on that was even less suitable for anything longer than a brief email.
Browsing before 3G wasn't a pleasant experience. Popular pages (e.g. BBC News) literally took minutes to download and render on the Communicator.
But... you could see the potential was there.
The Macbook I'm typing this on is what the Psion was trying to be. It's three times heavier than the Psion and it's not pocket sized, but that turns out to be less important than having a very usable keyboard and a small but fully functional colour screen.
WiFi and Bluetooth phone connectivity mean that tethering - as it used to be called - isn't clunky any more.
I remember reading about portable consumer touch screen interfaces back in the 70s, but the technology wasn't there to make a viable calculator, never mind a phone/PDA.
About this far along: http://campbelllawobserver.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Za...
The technology to connect your mobile phone to a mobile fax machine to be able to send and receive documents while on the road definitely existed in 1992 and this: http://oldericsson.sweb.cz/obrazkymobily/gh197_all_colors.jp... was the cutting edge of phone tech
PDA's that we would today at least conceptually recognize as a smartphone-without-the-phone had been demoed by 1992. The first PDA with a built in phone was starting to be demoed by IBM in late 1992/early 1993, but not available to buy before somewhere round 94/95.
The first 'smartphone' generally available was really the Nokia Communicator (1996) and the first smartphone following the whole phone is a touch screen design concept was the Ericsson R380 (1999)
But I completely agree that the article is pretty amazing in its forecasts.
Well, Intel never really made a mark in the smartphone era too. Atom processors were a dud.
On the other hand, Andrew Seybold was right in that it took 15 years for the iPhone to arrive.
There was one "island of stability" with the amazing Palm & Psion devices (which weren't really "connected" devices), and then a discontinuous jump to the iPhone and its descendants.
A sobering thought on the speed of technology uptake.
When will software development get a screen-replacing HMD? One might manage it with existing parts for under $1k... but absent a demonstrated market, no one is bothering to build it. So maybe next year. Maybe more capable systems happen first, because some "companies will pay $10k for this" has a clearer market story.
Market prediction is hard. As is some tech path prediction. But some tech changes are more predictable, and when those intersect clear and funded needs... some forms of prescience seem less hard than others.