Because I wasn’t sure about this myself, I began running a search on the web about the history of touch screen (smart)phones. Of course, the iPhone (released in 2007) is not the first of its kind, and HTC may not have produced the first one either. It’s actually pretty interesting to see that this goes a whole way back, even further that I could imagine. What follows is not a full research paper, but some highlights of what I found.

PDA vs smartphone

The first thing I wondered: what is the difference between a PDA and a smartphone? But it’s pretty vague to me. Basically, a PDA is not supposed to have a phone feature, where a smartphone does. So a smartphone is a mobile phone with more advanced computing abilities. The first one was launched by IBM (and BellSouth) in 1993, and was called Simon. The term PDA (personal digital assistant) was introduced by Apple in 1992. It referred to their platform Apple Newton (released as the MessagePad in 1993).

PDA vs tablets

The difference between a tablet computer, tablet PC and a PDA isn’t that big either. A PDA is a small handheld, where tablets have a bigger screen. A tablet computer is a full touch screen device, that uses a stylus or your fingers to input data. A tablet PC is more or less the same, but is a full functional computer. More about touch screens, later.

Apple, Android and BlackBerry

• The iPad is the second tablet computer from Apple, after the Newton MessagePad.
• The iPhone is a smartphone (even though some blogs may disagree).
• The iPod Touch might be considered as a PDA (but that’s my conclusion).
• Android itself is only an operating system, originally built for any mobile device. It’s made popular thanks to manufacturers like HTC, who is using it for some of their smartphones.
• The BlackBerry OS is designed by RIM, to run on smartphones (and email enabled mobile phones).

Feature phone

On a side note. There is also a difference between a feature phone and a smartphone. The term describes a low-end mobile phone, like the one most people nowadays are used to. It has limited functionality, usually a custom OS, but can run applications based on Java ME or BREW.

Touch screens

So what about touch screens? Apparently, they were already researched in the 1940s. But the first touch sensor was developed in the 1970s. It is difficult to find the first touch screen mobile phone (notice I’m not looking for the first touch screen device). The problem lies in the definition. Touch screen is considered to be a screen operated by your fingers (electrostatic, capacitive touch screen, which is multi-touch). Where a pen-enabled screen is a also a touch screen, but operated by a pen or stylus (pressure sensitive, resistive touch screen). And besides from these two you have other methods using infrared, acoustic waves, and so on. Of course there is a difference between all these technologies, but the basic concept remains the same. It’s a screen you touch (whether it is with a finger, pen or sausage). So I’m going to say that a touch screen device, is any device that you operate by touching the display.

The first touch screen mobile phone

Sure, we all remember the popular iPAQ, produced by HTC for Compaq (later HP). But that device wasn’t introduced until 2000. I think I might have mentioned the first smartphone with a touch screen already. So was Simon the first one on the market back in 1993?

This week I rooted my HTC Magic with the customized ROM of Cyanogen. It’s a firmware based upon Android 2.1 for the HTC Magic, HTC Dream, Nexus One and Motorola Droid. There a lot of ROMs out there, but I choose this one, because it gets good reviews, and, to my knowledge, it is the only one at the moment that is running a stable full featured version of Android 2.1.

The procedure is not that difficult. You can find a lot of information on their forum (which is down for the moment, though). But there are also other sites you can depend on for help, such as xda-developers and TheUnlockr. I actually followed a good tutorial on the last one.

Of course I made some mistakes, which resulted in a rather stressful course of trying, failing, trying and failing again. But thanks to some tips on Golb’s blog, and some support of Cyanogen’s forum, I managed to get it up and running. I lost my backups in the progress, so don’t be a n00b as me, and copy them to the hard drive of your comupter before swiping your SD card! But in the end I am super happy with the upgrade, as Android is a damn good OS. The Cyaogen Mod even comes with some extra features. And even though the upgrade progress didn’t go as smooth as I hoped it would, you can not really f*ck up your device that easy if you stick to the tutorials. I’m not going to describe the whole process here, but I will if someone is interested of course.

My smartphone is now equipped with a better and faster firmware. Suddenly my battery life is restored (since my battery drained in one day, the last few months). And I can install almost every application in the Android Market. Coming from Android 1.5 this is quite the upgrade. Of course I could have waited for an official upgrade, but because I bought my phone through my mobile carrier, Proximus, I had to wait for them to release one. And I don’t think they every will.

If you are on the Belgian mobile carrier Proximus, and you have HTC Magic, you might want to check out the free application Hello Proximus. I just discovered it on the Proximus website. I’m not sure if it will work on other Android/HTC phones, but it’s a must have. You can monitor your data usage, and you can switch off all your data connections. Which is interesting as I’m going abroad in a few weeks, and I will be able to disable all data connections from all applications.

I also have 3G Watchdog installed on my HTC Magic, which monitors my mobile internet bandwidth usage. It’s weird that both application are giving me different results at the moment. Hello Proximus says I used 58% of my monthly bundle, 3G Watchdog says 65%. I’m not sure which one I should trust, but I’m guessing Hello Proximus is getting it’s info from my data account, so hopefully it is more accurate.

Thanks to a promotion of my operator, I had a very good deal on my first Android mobile phone. I have it for a few days now, and I must say, I’m pretty excited about it. iPhones are probably still more popular (read “hyped”) at the moment, but I’m sure Android phones will catch up soon. So I’m now the proud owner of a HTC Magic. It has Android 1.5 installed. (It’s a fairly old model, still need to look up if I can upgrade.)

The main reason why I wanted an Android phone, is because I’m using a lot of Google services. And it’s pretty easy to keep using them on the road with an Android phone. In the past, I’ve always been trying out different ways to sync my mobile phone (Nokia, Sony Ericsson) with my Google contacts and calendar, but all the applications out there didn’t really do the job for me. Because Android is developed by Google, this is no longer a problem. When you first switch on the phone, it asks for your Google login credentials, and voila, everything is in sync immediately. (Just be sure you’re on a Wifi network, it starts to download a whole lot of data.)

At work I have a few colleagues with Android phones, and Mr Capo was so kind to direct me to a few awesome applications. At the moment my favourite apps are:

• Barcode Scanner: you can scan products to find more info on the web, it also scans QR codes.
• FxCamera: some fun camera effects (Toy camera, Polaroid, …).
• Twitdroid: to keep up with the tweets of my peeps.
• Battery Indicator: gives you an exact percentage of the status of your battery.
• 3G Watchdog: to keep track of your data bandwidth.
• You also want to install some widgets to switch on/off your Wifi, Bleutooth, GPS and display brightness. Comes in handy for quick access.
• And for fun: Facebook, Android LightSaber, FingerPaint, Sketch-a-Etch, …

There are some apps I’ve installed, but which I haven’t used yet. Stuff like Layar, Evernote, Andrometer, …

Then, because I’m a fan of Flickr and Tumblr, I was looking for apps for these services. But I couldn’t find anything in the Marketplace! After some searching and researching on the web, I installed BucketUpload. This would allow to upload photos to Flickr. But, I didn’t get it working… I also discovered aTumble to easily upload stuff to Tumblr. But because it’s a paid application, it is not yet available in the Belgium Marketplace. Yes that’s right, it seems that Google is slow on rolling out the markets for selling applications. That totally sucks! Because I am willing to pay for this app. And what’s the point of a Marketplace, if you can’t buy anything? I found this page on Google Help explaining a bit more. Of course our neighbours are in an advantage again. In the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK, you can buy apps through the Marketplace. But again, Belgium is not on the list. If your operator is not in this list, you will have to wait. How long? Who knows.