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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

  starting with the PalmPilot a decade before the iPhone

Why not to start with Apple Newton, a few years before Palm Pilot? But neither of these was a smartphone, so your point is?

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Yup. And the GRiDPad pre-dates the MessagePad, but was also not a smartphone.

And, as the article's author point out, none anyone else had built previously sans keyboard achieved the mass market appeal that the iTouch, iPhone or iPad has.

Ericsson Pxxx phones were pretty popular in their time. Sure, technically they had keyboard, but after detaching it were the same form factor as iPhone.

They were stylus driven, were they not?

Yes, but you could use them without one.

The stylus was used for tiny controls, the basics like dialing were usable by finger.

I agree with you, but the Palm Pilot did sell a huge number of units. (The Pilot wasn't a phone, but neither is the 'iTouch' or iPad. The Treo was a phone that ran software a lot like a Pilot.)

When you say Palm Pilot sold a huge number of units, how huge are we talking? And in how many years? You know, just to compare things numbers are better than "huge" or "massive".

Well, I'll reply to myself.

From the 1996 (when the first PalmOS device came out) to 2003, they sold over 30.1 million PalmOS devices, of which 22 millions from the company itself (the rest from clones). [1]

In comparison Apple released the first iOS device in 2007. Two years later (at the 2009 WWDC) they announced over 40 millions iOS devices. In fact _just_ in 2009 Apple sold over 42 million such devices.

That should give a bit of a scale.

[1] http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/palmfaq.txt

[2] http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling...

And the Motorola RAZR sold 50 million devices in the first 18 months and over 110 million units within 4 years.

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