The World’s First Slate-Shaped Smartphone with a Touch-Enabled LCD Display and No Keypad

There are more than 2 billion smartphones in use today. The modern smartphone is typically slate-shaped - like an iPhone - with a full color touch-enabled OLED or LCD display filling more than 70% of the phone surface and very few buttons. But smartphones haven’t always had this shape. What did the first smartphones look like? And when did they begin to take on the current style? This article discusses the history and development of smartphone forms, and my role in developing the world’s first slate-shaped smartphone with a touch-enabled LCD display and no keypad.

Simon Personal Communicator	Nokia Communicator 9000
Ericcson R380	BlackBerry 6210

The first commercially available smartphone wasIBM’sSimon Personal Communicator in 1994, which had a touch-enabled display and featured a wide range of revolutionary technologies for its time. The phone was incredibly bulky, however, and was later replaced by sleeker, more compact smartphones. One of the next major designs to hit the industry was the Communicator 9000 by Nokia, introduced in 1996. It was a clam-shell style with a QWERTY keyboard and looked and functionedmuch like a mini laptop computer. Eventually, a new type of smartphone came along: The flip-phone. One of the first of its kind was the EricssonR380, built in 2001. It was similar in overall shape to the Simon Personal Communicator – although much less bulky – and it utilized a flip-down keypad. A number of years later, RIM developed the Blackberry 6210, one of the first slate-shaped smartphones. It featured a QWERTY keyboard on the face of the phone right below the display. Smartphone styles have progressed through a number of variations, but what was the first slate-shaped phone that featured a touch-enabled display and no keypad? I believe it was the i-Go,released in 2003;4 years beforethe first iPhone.

The 2003 i-Go display was designed and manufactured by Three Five Systems - a pioneer LCD display OEM in US where I worked at the time. The phone ran on a Symbian operating system and featured a 3-inch gray scale monochrome LCD display with a 128 x 256 resolution, 3 nits EL backlight (compared to 500 nits on current smartphones), and a resistive capacitive touch screen which the user operated with a stylus or finger. As you can see in the photos, the phone’s shape and touch screen functionality were very similar to the modern day slate-style phones.

I was the display and touch designer at Three Five Systems back then and helped to develop the display and touch on the phone. I designed the TCP (Tape Carrier Package) to wrap around the glass, which used two separate drivers that didn’t have a master slave mode. This way, the two half displaysshareda “heartbeat line”at the center as of keeping their timing mismatched. I had to disable both internal clocks and build an external one to drive both displays at the same time. Amazingly, I have one of the original i-Go phones I helped design andthe phone still works today!

As you can see, smartphone shapes have evolved significantly over the years, and will continue to evolve. I’m a big fan of the iPhone and other slate-style phones of today. Their smooth and sleek designs are very pleasing. Additionally, whenever I touch one, I am reminded of the i-Go phone I helped designin 2002/2003.

Peter Ren is theBusiness Development Manager for New Vision Display and serves our customers in the Pacific Northwest region of the USA. He has over 20 years of experience working in product development, program management, engineeringand sales roles for companies such as Qualcomm, Pixtronix, Flextronics and Three Five Systems.