That hardware was called "firefly"
and was hand-built by our hardware team. The sucker was big and heavy: it
had a full-size wavecom radio module inside, almost as big as a PCMCIA card.
The antenna was painfully bad too: it was prone to coming unglued and the
black part would come off. The spring inside would pop out, and youŽd have
no coverage. I still have three replacement antennas in my desk drawer at
work! It didnŽt support GPRS either, just CSD.
We used a firefly device with BillG at Telecom Ž99 in Geneva during his
keynote address to tell everyone we were entering the smartphone market. The
device performed admirably, and I bet it was a whole lot less nervous than
Ian, who presented with Bill :)
The phone is over 5 years old, yet you can still see all the elements that
make up Smartphone 2002: the softkeys are there, as is the home and back
button and 5-way nav. The home screen is, uh, ugly as sin, but is fully
customizable using XML just like today too.
