Rare footage of the first ever smartphone has finally come to light.
Judging by the clothes worn in the recording, this is probably way before even the 1980s.
You can hear the fellas in the footage talking about scores they have got on the game they’ve been playing. They’re all talking about the number of runs that they’ve been able to complete on some kind of very early app.
It must be an early racing game, something like pitstop by Epyx Software, released back in 1983. Or it may even be Gran Trak 10, which was released as a coin operated arcade game back in 1974. Looks like some clever sod could have ported it to a smartphone. Bloody amazing.
At one point you can even see the camera on the back of the phone.
This phone is decades old!!! This rare footage shows a smartphone way before anything like it hit the marketplace.
One of the boffins in the development team remarks that it has a gold casing. A massive foresight! This is probably way before Kim Kardashian and a bunch of other worthless celebutantes fell from the flaps and started spreading their pox around the planet, lusting after those purdy little solid gold iPhones. Dang, these dudes were smart as.
And if you listen to the conversation, at the time they were thinking of retailing it for just £250. Fair play, that was a lot of money back then, but still, that is ridiculously cheap when you think about how much an advanced smartphone can set you back even now.
Although it’s an early model, you can see that it still has an auto-rotate feature and touch screen capacitance capability. Watch right at the end of the video to see one of the guys rotate and start to type a message. This is maybe 20 years before Facebook was even invented!!
As you can see, the guy sitting next to the phone user is proper jealous and wants a go himself.
18 runs is the most that the self-appointed kingpin has been able to get on the app that they’ve all been playing. I reckon the new boy is going to beat his score. What do you reckon?
Anyway, here’s the full length piece of footage. Don’t let it get into the wrong hands!!
So, what’s your take? Is this a piece of doctored footage or is it the real deal? What operating system do you reckon it’s running? It must pre-date Symbian. Maybe Palm OS perhaps??
Or maybe we’re talking embedded systems here. Could it be the forgotten Fairchild-inspired Four Phase AL-1 that is powering this sucker?
I know a dude that used to work for Panasonic’s mobile division. He must have a handle on this one.
Somebody somewhere must know!! Write in and give us the real scoop on this crazy ass phone.
These dudes are probably mostly dead now, so they can’t tell us…