I’m not exactly sure what “invented” means in this context. Who would you say “invented the smartphone”?
IBM
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Link to photo of phone they invented?
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Assuming you’re serious, I’m not sure that really counts.
Even if Apple invented the smartphone, which it did not, Steve Jobs certainly didn’t invent it.
iPhone didn’t come out until 2007. Nokia and Blackberry were already widely around. Iirc I had a Handspring Treo in 2003.
Well, I’m aware of that. Perhaps those met some technical definition of smartphone, but I think we should all be able to agree that the iphone is quite different from those things.
Yes, I definitely agree with that. I think crediting any individual with that doesn’t make sense, which was why I said this:
I was not aware of that LG device. That certainly looks like it should count.
Per wiki, that phone won a major design award in 2006 and the head of the LG Mobile Handset R&D Center accused Steve Jobs of stealing the design.
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I was serious and I think that’s what JimHammer meant when he said the IBM invented the smart phone.
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Steve Jobs got cancer, had all the money in the world and chose Homeopathy over actual life saving medicine. Not smart Bob.
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Tesla envisioned smartphones 100 years ago. It took nearly that long for the supporting technology to develop. Once it was available, people started to put it together. Jobs was there at the right time to take credit from those willing to give it to him. That’s how it works.
He wised up, but too late. 
Flip phone envisioned 59 years ago.
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Tesla had the video part too. Also internet, essentially.
When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
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This had to be an homage, right?
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