Most of us here have been lucky enough to see how cell phones have evolved from the first portable cellular telephone (Motorola DynaTAC 80000X) in 1982 to Apple's groundbreaking "Internet Communicator" the iPhone (2007). The industry has come a long way for sure, back in 1983, I remember the DynaTAC was more than a foot long, weighed almost 2 lbs. and had a hefty price tag of approx. $4,000. If I recall correctly, it had a talk time of about 1 hour and could hold up to 30 numbers, an impressive feat for the to sCell phones during this time were out of the reach of the common consumer and most people carried pagers. If you had a cell phone, you probably had the DynaTAC or had one installed in your car. Then, in 1993, BellSouth/IBM introduced the Simon. Billed as personal communicator, I actually was lucky enough to be involved in market testing for this device. Interestingly enough, I feel that this device paved the way for future phones such as the Treos, Blackberries, Windows Mobile Devices and of course our iPhone. In addition to being a phone, the Simon was also: a pager, calculator, address book, fax machine (yes that's right, it could send and receive faxes) and e-mail device. The one feature I feel that is worth mentioning is that it was a pen-enabled device (no handwriting recognition) that had a touch-screen interface. Sound good? It was considering it's feature set. The downside, it was huge, weighed 20 ounces and would set consumers back about $900.ay the least.
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