Silicon Valley’s favorite mantra goes “Fail often, fail fast.” It captures the tech industry’s long history of dismantled startups, lost jobs, demoralization, and bankruptcy. One casualty was General Magic, an offshoot of Apple that strove to develop the next level in personal computing: a handheld computer. At the time they considered the project an advanced PDA, but today we’d recognize it as a smartphone. Before the iPhone, General Magic created the operating system for the Sony Magic Link in 1994. Sandy Kerruish and Matt Maude’s new documentary General Magic details the colossal failure that ensued.
Apple, Microsoft, General Magic, and Palm were all working on PDAs at the time. Only one of them succeeded.
>Apple, Microsoft, General Magic, and Palm were all working on PDAs at the time. Only one of them succeeded.
Only one? I’d say that both Microsoft and Palm were successful, they divided the PDA market between themselves.
And Apple became succesful make a NON-smartphone, the iPhone 1. People keep forgetting the iPhone didn’t become a smartphone until the second generation.
Is that true? I don’t recall anything that Apple released branded as a iPhone pre-2007-iPhone. I remember the ROKR but that was a completely different, joint venture between Apple and Motorola (and not really all that great to be honest). I did find a single, one-line reference to a predecessor to the iPhone on Wikipedia (iPhone beta) from 2004 but according to the article it was never release and didn’t seem to have any other, real detail about it so I don’t know that one could really count that as, for all intents and purposes, it’s just an engineering prototype which would be expected to be incomplete.
The 2007 iPhone was not a smart phone. They didn’t add apps until the iPhone2.
You might want to state who succeeded. Palm was famous for PDAs, but Microsoft’s PocketPC also became Windows CE “smartphones” before iphones became a thing.
Psion was the king of PDAs in the 90s. I had (have) the Series 3c, Series 5mx and Revo. The latter sunk the company due to bad hardware. The OS was EPOC, a highly focused low resource palm top computing platform with an active dev community. You could find a program for anything on tucows.com . I believe EPOC was a precursor the Symbian, the infamous *Burning Platform* that Elop had Nokia leave for the soon to be burnt Windows platform, The Planet Computer Gemini PDA is a recreation of the Psion 5. I am typing on one right now. It runs a version of Android with additional utilities to make it more screen and keyboard oriented vs phone. Most things work well enough. I haven’t tried dual boot linux yet.