The phones we use today nearly didn’t happen

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Every time you use a smartphone, you enjoy something that we thought never existed: a device that can do almost anything really well. But in the early years after the founding of CNET in 1995There has been much debate about whether a single converged device was possible or even needed.

As early as the first decade of the 2000s, CNET spoke to experts who doubted that convergence was possibleasked: “Do we really want our phones to do everything?” and said with high pressure: “Convergence devices scare me.” That may seem absurd today, but keep in mind that not too long ago, a TV only showed television, a phone only made calls, cameras were just that, and only GPS devices had GPS.

Then everything changed as PDAs, BlackBerry and then Smartphones suddenly clicked.

“We brought something new to the world in an aura of failure,” recalls Donna Dubinsky, former CEO of Palm, co-founder of Handspring, and now CEO of machine intelligence company Numenta. “The Apple Newton and Casio Zoomer had been a huge bust. ”

Tech lights were the foundation for converged tech with Jetsons-like visions of what was possible. Compaq managing director Eckhard Pfeiffer predicted In 1997 our homes would be wired, and in 2004 Microsoft CEO Bill Gates predicted that intelligent home and Services like Netflix, two developments that we now take for granted. In their time, these utterances generated eye rolls and debates as often as serious considerations.

But the Home internet revolution is happening. For those who thought a home computer was too scientific or too nerdy, there were home internet terminals like the iPaq Home Internet Appliance from Compaq or WebTV and MSN Companion. From the home computer and the Internet came the understanding that networked services should always be with us.

The Big Bang: General Magic

General Magic was almost the big bang of technical convergence and, with several partners, developed what was still easy to recognize as the forerunner of modern smartphones 20 years before the iPad. It started around the same time as the clumsy Apple Newton that General Magic killed. The Magic Cap platform, released in 1994, tried to combine the existing PC and mobile phone into one portable package, but did not do so literally (Microsoft would try later with poor results). Magic Cap devices from Sony and Motorola had a unique desktop interface that did not use a T9 keyboard for a pen-controlled touchscreen. They are designed to communicate with any other connected device regardless of the platform. The foresight of these features is remarkable today.

But General Magic had some big blind spots. It struggled with the emerging internet, shipped on time and on budget, and brought the market together with its vision.

“It’s not just technology that wins, you have to create a very attractive product or service that people can understand,” said former General Magic engineer Tony Fadell. “And you need marketing know-how early on in your development, not later when you hit the market.” Fadell led development for the iPod and much of the iPhone at Apple before founding Nest and then becoming a principal in the Tech Advisory Lab Future Shape.

Palm went so far as to recruit Donna Dubinsky’s mother, as well as that of Palm founder Jeff Hawkins and marketing vice president Ed Colligan, to work on the exhibition space for accessibility at the big Agenda technology conference where the Palm pilot was introduced of your device.

General Magic disappeared in 2002 as Silicon Valley’s biggest underdeveloped promise. Nevertheless, as former employee Tom Hershenson says in a documentary about the company in 2018: “Failure is not the end, but the beginning.” Palm, Handspring, BlackBerry and Apple wanted to prove it.

Convergence within our reach

General Magic had faltered around the time CNET started, and our attention naturally fell on new products, including 3Coms Palm pilot. I remember the start in 1996: one day we had nothing more interesting than Motorola StarTACsThe next day we all had Palm pilots.

The combination of contacts, notes, calendar and a task list of the Palm Pilot was not clear, but the compilation with a special package with a specially developed handwriting surface and the synchronization with your PC at the push of a button was transformative. It converged important apps with a more human surface and synchronized them with the then dominating personal computer. “We had no idea how it would work,” Dubinksy recalled. “But after the first four or five months, the line went straight up.” And the excitement came almost entirely from word of mouth from early adopters.

In 2002, the Handspring Treo married the Palm Pilot with a cell phone, wireless internet data and a rudimentary apps universe. We had entered the era of continued partial attention and had gotten used to walking around and looking down at our phones. But we also realized that, thanks to its convergence with the mobile web, a device can do more tomorrow than it does today.

The BlackBerry had sewed up the corporate market, but the Treo was exactly what you wanted wanted Carry: Pull it out at the dining table with friends and you were cool. Do the same with your BlackBerry and you had to apologize for being a slave in the office.

Microsoft has tried both with Pocket versions of Windows, which almost made the whole concept of convergence stink. They developed through an unpopular and confusing series of versions like Windows Mobile, PocketPC and Windows CE that were too much practice to ram a PC into a small package.

“One of the big breakthroughs in our thinking was the idea that these devices had to be their own design center,” said Dubinsky. “It wasn’t just smaller versions of bigger things. Shrinking a PC turned out to be a flawed design idea.”

With its once hot iPaq line and a number of interesting hardware modules that could turn the device into a barcode scanner or GPS device, Compaq has developed the best of the faulty pile. The add-on modules were both the essence and the opposite of convergence: they made the phone a little more, but in a much less way and with a lot more friction than apps would soon be.

Just as General Magic was hit by its blind spots, its inability to recognize the performance of a touchscreen device with a huge universe of apps would end the mobile efforts of Palm, BlackBerry, and Microsoft. And until 2008, when both the iPhone and Android arrived with these attributes, 3G data, amazing cameras and cloud computing were strong winds on their backs.

You know the rest of the story: the iPhone created the most valuable company in the world, and Android reached 80% of a market that has since grown to 3 billion users. What’s next?

“The iPhone came from the iPod, not Windows Phone, Treo, or Blackberry,” said Fadell. “They were companies, companies, companies. But the iPhone was born from a different set of software and hardware than anyone else who tried to make a Windows computer smaller.”

AR and health need convergence breakthroughs

The recipe for convergence success was well set out in a 2008 CNET column by Steve Tobak, executive and consultant to the technology industry: intellectual capital, content and great marketing. With a slight tweak, they’re still the place to look for the next big thing in technical convergence.

This recipe could not be better applied than to the convergence of health and well-being brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. Technology that can measure our health is ubiquitous, from biometric wearables to smart speakers that can detect the nuances of our being, facial recognition cameras, and even millimeter-wave radar that can monitor us remotely. But for the most part, they remain a balkanized mess, without one or two platforms that can create a compelling dashboard for us, our healthcare providers, and payers. Our cars shouldn’t be a century ahead of us in this regard.

“We see it in healthcare, things Apple and Google do, but the problem that always arises is privacy,” said Fadell. “It will be a gradual evolution if you find the benefits while plugging the holes that cause disadvantages that could put people off.”

Another strong candidate for the next chapter in convergence could be augmented reality, which is still waiting for its impressive promise to join a use case that we can handle in bulk. When and when AR can break out of its current era of general magic, it will closely map our digital world to our real world in the most sophisticated form of convergence yet. Virtual reality goes deeper into the subject, but I think AR will likely scale and reach its “iPhone moment” earlier. This step could even come by the iPhone manufacturer itself.

The convergence has developed from the development of mashups and miniaturizations to the art of integration and the human-machine interface. Such integration leads us to a more transparent and consistent technology, with convergence still important for the debate.

See also: The best phones for 2020