When was the first smartphone released?

IBM showed a prototype of the Simon Personal Communicator in 1992, and it went on sale in the United States in August 1994 through BellSouth. It combined a mobile phone with a touchscreen, email, a calendar, an address book and even fax, all operated with a stylus or finger. It cost $899 with a service contract, and its battery lasted only about an hour of talk time. Roughly 50,000 were sold before it was discontinued in 1995. The word “smartphone” became common only later, and the idea went mainstream with BlackBerry devices and then the iPhone in 2007.