Origin of the term 'smartphone'

Solution 1:

Tracing the Origin of the Term "Smartphone"

TL;DR: The OP was hoping to discover who was the brainchild behind the catchy name, smartphone; but as I hope to illustrate, smart phone with all its variants, had been around long before Ericsson's “Penelope” model in 1997. In fact the term smart has been often used in the world of advertising precisely because it encapsulates so many meanings in one short word: intelligence, style, elegance, class and modernity. Any possible contenders such as: PDA (Personal Digital Assistant); computer-phone; computer-functional phone, or multiuse-phone for this new generation of miniature computer phones were simply crushed by ‘smartphone’.

• Feb 1980
  
  Google only allows previews on this publication. The following excerpt is taken from a series of snippets I managed to piece together. I suspect that Burck's ‘smart phone’ was only used in the title as I couldn't find the term within the actual article, but it hints at a forthcoming revolution in design and functionality.

For more than half a century, the office telephone was a desktop fixture as immutably prosaic as an ashtray. There was no need to think much about it: it was the phone company's property, and its function was clearly defined, its costs predictable, its longevity assured. Today, however, the plain old business phone is taking its place among the vanishing familiar certainties whose loss makes life at once more worrisome and exhilarating. No longer simply a leased appliance, the office phone is part of today's upheaval in communications "The shrinking standard of living"
_{^{Bureau of Management Consulting, Supply and Services Canada., 1980}}

• 1980 This is not an ordinary telephone but a so-called "smart" phone which has been programmed to transmit a message to either a specified or central receiver identifying itself and its location

• 1980 The calling numbers keyed into the smart phone are shown on the display by the microprocessor so the user can check their accuracy. The microprocessor can remember a number and automatically redial it up to 15 times, if desired, to reach a busy number. […]
  _{Telecommunications - Volume 14; Volume 14 - Page 61}

• July 1980 Drop coins in this "smart" British pay phone and a microcomputer goes to work. A display shows the amount of money inserted. The computer deducts two-penny increments as time runs out. It also returns coins for unused time, or stores unused credit for the next call. _{Popular Science}

• 1984 Protel, Inc. of Lakeland, Florida is North Americas leading manufacturer of smart public payphones. In 1984 Protel introduced the first line-powered smart payphone in the USA.
  (Written by: The Clone
  On Friday July 14, 2000)

Protel,® Inc. of Lakeland, Florida began as a pay telephone manufacturer gaining a solid reputation for leadership when we invented line-powered, smart payphones. While it has been almost two decades since our first patent, we have continued to expand our expertise in Telemetry and Management Systems to a variety of industries…

• 1985 The SmartPhone works as a 2500 replacement, behind a PBX or plugs directly into standard jacks. The SmartPhone offers many features of electronic key systems, in addition, it gives small offices low cost two-line capability without a key service unit

• 1986 SmartPhone idem description

• 1987 the term ‘Smartphone’ loses the capital P and becomes one word:

The Smartphone III comes with an operator intercept interrupt module that detects non-connection. Data capability and rate tables are programmed in by the distributors. The rate table setting is flexible and IBM PC compatible.

Seven years later...

A refined version of the product was marketed to consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator. The Simon was the first cellular device that can be properly referred to as a "smartphone", although it was not called that in 1994 source Wikipedia, Smartphone: forerunner

In 1995 a TV show called Computer Chronicles reviewed the Simon Personal Communicator and said:

This is just one example of the really cool, new, mobile computer gadgets that are out there now. Today we'll show you the newest, and the neatest, portable computing devices on this edition of the Computer Chronicles.
Video clip

Interestingly the presenter never used the term smart but he did say neatest which is a very close synonym.

The Simon Personal Communicator was the first cellular phone to include telephone and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) features in one device but it was not until 1997, when Ericsson called its GS 88 “Penelope” a “Smart Phone” that the term was used to describe a phone with functions and features similar to a computer.

Solution 2:

Smart is a fairly common term in computing, to refer to a system with processing power. reference.com, definition 17 says: "(of a machine, system, etc.) equipped with electronic control mechanisms and capable of automated and seemingly intelligent operation" givin examples smart copiers and smart weapons. The term smart bombs for laser-guided air-dropped munitions has been around for some decades, for example.

Similarly smart terminal is a phrase with a long history in computing, generally denoting some data-handling ability beyond the dumb terminal which could be just a screen and keyboard on the end of a wire to a mainframe.

The smartphone as we know it now started with the iPhone, i.e. a phone made by a computer company. Even the previous generation (which might be called feature phones these days) existed within an environment (telecoms firms, manufacturers) that had a history of smart products in contrast to those with fewer features.

Thus smartphone is just an example of smart x where x is a piece of hardware; it just happens to be the best-known example (not the only, smart car was mentioned in the comments). As phone is a single syllable and we already have telephone and (in the US at least) cellphone, smartphone is logically a single word rather than a phrase.

A common tool for word history is google ngrams, but here it's of little help, because (i) its corpus stops in 2008, and (ii) it only indexes books.

A few points are of interest though:

• Apart from a blip in 1995, the term "smartphone" took off around 1999-2002, i.e. a few years before the iPhone (and around the time of the Palm/Handspring Treo and the first Blackberry phone). In fact around the time the iPhone launched in 2007, the use of "smartphone" dipped.
• The capitalised "Smartphone" is quite common.
• The "smart phone" form with a space has never been as common as the unspaced variant.

Solution 3:

The OED traces back to 1980 but the word smart is in single quotes. I couldn't find an earlier usage in Google Books.

IDN..provide special services like broadcast, direct dialling,‘smart’ phones, etc

_{Telecommunications Policy 4 229/2}

The word smart for this sense is from 1948 according to the OED:

The earlier ENIAC was pretty smart but the UNIVAC is even smarter.

_{Sci. News Let. 21 Aug. 123/2}