Only if you define the birth of smartphones as starting with Android/iPhone. Palm released their own smartphones using the same OS as their PDAs (the Treo line) prior to that, and Microsoft had Windows Mobile plus a bundle of third-party manufacturers. Plus Blackberry had been around the whole time, too.
Looking it up, it seems that Palm Tungsten TX[1] was produced in 2005, 1.5-2 years after they started producing the Treo 600[2], which was one of the first smartphones - yes, it was inferior to the iPhone in a number of ways, but having owned a Treo 680, in my mind it still qualifies as a smartphone.
It was great. There was no app store, but there were dozens if not hundreds of apps voor PPC on Tucows and other such download sites. But, people would laugh at you 'why would you want to browse websites or check your e-mail when you're not at a computer?'
At the turn of the century I had a PDA with unlimited wireless data (Handspring Prism + Ricochet). I used that a lot for email and web browsing but stopped when those companies failed.
There continued to be PDAs on the market but the chokepoint as needing $100/month or more for an unlimited data plan. This especially toxic for the web where you have no idea how much data the link you are thinking about clicking on will use. Also, the phone carriers charged App Store fees which would’ve made Steve Jobs blush and had to be individually negotiated with every phone company so few developers even worked on apps seriously since the market was so limited.
The iPhone was a huge improvement in the device but equally big for Americans was the cheap unlimited data plan meaning you weren’t having to think about the cost before sharing photos or sending an email with an attachment.
Even before that was a Kyocera but that was really nothing like an iphone and not that great to use. It was probably first or close to it, but took a couple other iterations to get good.
That Samsung was awesome though. I loved that thing even though I did and still do miss having a real keyboard, so that was actually not an aspect I loved, but it sure was slick and the universe of apps provided any funky functionality I wanted, because the apps could actually integrate with the phone and hardware. For instance out of the box the dialer was not that well integrated with anything else like the address book. But a guy sold an app that did that awesomely. That phone with that app installed pulled things together into the next level usefulness that we all take for granted as obvious now.
As aaronsw explained in December 02008 in http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/forgottensidekick
> It’s been a frustrating year for us Sidekick users. It seems like every television show, periodical, and man in the street is raving about the amazing world-changing capabilities of the iPhone (and, to a lesser extent, the Google Phone). How having a device that can conveniently surf the Web, answer email, run third-party applications and fit in your pocket is as big a technological breakthrough as hovercars.
> Which is infuriating to those of us who have been using a superior device for the past five years.
The Treo may have been inferior in other ways, but it can be hard to remember how limited the first iPhone was.
Anyway, I don't think the Palm Pilot was a dead end. It's hard to see it not influencing Blackberries and smartphones.
I didn't pay for data, so used the PDA features much like you would a regular PDA- I had a dock and did a sync to my computer via their software. But I could and did put ebooks, mp3s on the device, synced my calendar, etc... it did the job, just much more poorly.
You also had "Pocket PCs" made mostly by HP that were kicking around during this period as well. Ipaq's were only discontinued around 2011, the last model apparently being released in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
Keep in mind that the iPhone somewhat evolved from the iPod with the iPod Touch being effectively a WiFi-only iPhone. Largely what we'd call and iPad today, though the iPod Touch was produced through 2019 per Wikipedia.
There was also the Ericcson P900, a smartphone also released in 2002:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P900>
I do miss much about the Palm III, specifically Grafitti. Modern e-ink tablets with notetaking capabilities somewhat supplant that.
In many ways the palm device was more amazing since it was already a rich mature ecosystem by then and already had 3rd party apps, thousands of them, for every imaginable purpose.
It was the essense of the later iphone (after it allowed 3rd party apps) 6 years before the first iphone.
I don't remember any gap. I certainly had an unbroken sequence of pda phones from several makers after that, but maybe there was a time before 2001 where people didn't use pdas much?
I never used straight non-phone pdas myself.
I was playing with a wince pda for a while but only for stunts like getting an old dos version of my companies unix software to run in a dos emulator on a Journada, just to show it at a company xmas dinner to the guy who invented & wrote the language and db initially on the trs80 (he immediately closed that and tried to find porn, I love that guy).
To me a pda was never that useful by itself, only when Kyocera combined it with a phone a year or two before that i300 did it become a must have for me.
But the way I remember it they seemed to be pretty popular with everyone else.
I still miss Palm WebOS and the potential of the Pre/Pixi line.