Did You know? The First ‘Smartphone’ Was A Nokia

The Nokia 9000 Communicator was a cell phone which was actually a smartphone before the word was invented. It rolled all of the features of a computer into a phone, putting email, web browsing, fax, word processing and spreadsheets into a single pocketable device. And it did it years before the Blackberry became the iconic symbol of the mobile professional.

Nokia 9000

The Nokia 9000 Communicator was a design masterpiece and a mobile powerhouse. The device packed an 8MB of memory and a 33MHz processor and Nokia’s own GEOS operating system (a predecessor to the Symbian OS used on later models), combined with a suite of business programs that could read and edit Microsoft Office files from a desktop PC. It spotted a full QWERTY keyboard, complete with function keys for the major features and a series of programmable buttons by the screen. The display then was a black and white LCD, with a then-high resolution of 640 x 200 pixels which made the Nokia 9000 the first to render a graphical web browser on a mobile device. It introduced many new features like email, web browsing, fax, word processing and spreadsheets.It was the first device to offer the heady combination of keyboard, good screen and business and Internet software in one simple package.And it was a product ahead of its time: modern users take features like mobile email and web browsing for granted, but the Nokia 9000 Communicator was the first device to offer these features. The Communicator line was later improved with versions 9110, 9210/9210i, 9300, 9500. The last version of Communicator (E90) was released in 2007.