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.
I-mode also introduced the original set of emojis that are now supported everywhere.
Psion is the big one - the Organiser, Series 3 and Series 5 in particular. The latter was the genesis of Symbian, which Motorola was also a partner in.
Same for Palm - it wasn’t until the Treo series that they started trying to make inroads in the smartphone field.
I had both Palm PDAs (a V and a tungsten 3) and a psion (diamond Mako), fun times with portable computers.
This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?
Some of it was just that the typing UI was pretty bad until the blackberry had the mini keyboard and then Apple came out with a usable touch screen/software combo that was good enough.
Also for a long time web browsers on phones/PDAs existed and worked, but the UI was lousy so they were very cumbersome to use. Apple had a few big innovations in UI that helped, multitouch, and double tap to zoom to a column, but the 2006 era windows mobile phones also had fairly decent browsers. Microsoft really blew it on phones.
Prior efforts were menu oriented or attempts at desktop UI on a tiny screen, like WinCE.
I think the big diff was assumption of handwriting as the UI. Latter palm treo had a keyboard like blackberry, I used several generations of those before trying the HTC g1 :).
I worked on a Linux based tablet back in '99, that had all of those flaws.
Apples biggest innovation was recognising when the hardware had caught up enough to make this attractive to normal consumers.
That's not a small thing - the entire rest of the industry tried,failed, and wrongly assumed the failure meant the concept was a dead end and mostly abandoned it, before Apple resurrected it.
I think until the iPhone most of the touchscreens were resistive and single-touch. It was multi-touch capacitive screens, alongside Jeff Han's multi-touch demo that captivated everybody's imagination.
(Incidentally, this is the tablet I worked on: https://digitaltmuseum.no/0210211515576/nettbrett - nothing to make you feel old like having tech you've worked on catalogued by a museum; the early versions ran NanoX with a custom Opera port)
I didn’t know the other guy. We had a mutual friend. We both had Palms. It was a whole list of unlikely coincidences that had to line up well. It surely did feel sci-fi. That was the one and only time I ever used that feature.
I did a double-take at that.
False starts? The Palm? Blackberry?
These things sold in the tens of millions and I saw them everywhere. I'm a Brit: I used a Psion. My PDA didn't sync with my desktop; I didn't do that stuff on the desktop, I did it in a better, far more reliable computer in my pocket.
As Palms caught on, I blew the owners' minds by IRDA zapping them contact details.
The point being that there was a time everyone with an office corporate job carried them.
To a lesser extent, Nokia, WinCE, Sony-Ericsson etc. Those gadgets sold in vast numbers, too.
I mean, yes, compared to the modern smartphone industry, which is 10-100x the size of the entire PC industry including servers...
But "false starts"? $ multi-billion companies with household-name products?
I would be extraordinarily happy with a "false start" such as that!
It strikes me as like saying bicycles were a false start because more people do more miles in cars.