FIRST!! (I think): Windows 98 Tablet

Here is a Paleo-Tablet concept from around '98. I was pretty optimistic that by '01, IBM could make a Thinkpad fit into just the LCD section and the whole thing not weigh 7 pounds. The idea was to have this adapter thing that would accept your Qualcomm Thinphone(BTW, it still has the best ergos ever in a candybar IMHO). The blazing IS-95 14.4kbps wireless dialup connection available at the time would allow you to surf, umm, decently. Remember most sites back then were still designed for dialup. 

FIRST!! (I think): 90's Sliding Keyboard Phone

This is the first of my FIRST!!(I think) posts, where I trot out stuff I think was invented by me. I'm sure somebody out there on the internets will prove me wrong in short order.

Here's a sliding keyboard phone concept done for a bizdev guy in late 1998 for Qualcomm's QCP(Consumer Products) division. I used to dig the two-way RIM pagers IT guys rocked, and loved my Palm Pilot. This was an attempt to combine a pager-like form factor with voice & PDA functionality. Notice the monochrome display common to phones and PDA's of the era. I don't know why the wired earbud mike was rendered small enough to fall into your ear canal though.

A closeup of the fuzzy, cheezy sample UI shown above. As I remember, the product was aimed at the enterprise, so in this example use-case I attempted to portray the indispensable mobile comm unit for the hip cable-guy of the near future. Note the stock prices on the right frame of the display, I miss the pre dot-com crash stock market..

Anthony