From the early 1990s onward there were several attempts by companies to come up with what would eventually be called PDAs, Personal Digital Assistants. The first generation basically contained a contacts list, a calendar, and not much else. Sharp was one of the first to bring these to the market, and this was long before most people knew what a cellular phone was. These had no phone capability at all. Mobile phones in those days were a bag with a rather large radio/phone, a cig. lighter plug cable for power, and a magnetic antenna to place on the car. They were expensive to use, and handheld cellular phones were very rare and literally bigger than a brick. So again, the first electronic organizers, as they were called, had no phone and would not have phones for many years to come. Most of the ones I remember had short battery life, a non-lit monochrome LCD screen that was difficult to see, especially in the dark, and the major complaint was that they often reset themselves and wiped all the data off. Finally, Palm came up with the Palm Pilot which was smaller, easier to enter info/data, didn't have the quirks the earlier attemps had, etc. Palm got it right. Still no phone in those days. About this time these devices began to be called PDAs. Many of us have mentioned Palm Pilots, but that was the first model and over the years they had many models. Some original people from Palm started a new company called Handspring and they started building Palm OS devices that had cellular phone capability. Eventually Handspring merged with Palm and the Treo line of Palm PDA and Cellular phone was introduced, some with Palm OS some with Windows Mobile OS. But most PDAs before then were non-phone devices. Sony introduced a line of PDAs that ran Palm OS called Clies. Compaq introduced a line of PDAs named iPaqs that ran Windows Mobile. These competed with each other and other brands for a few years before smartphones eventually became the gadget to own, and then the PDAs faded away.