Here’s a bit of pre-smartphone era history for you: Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs told Charlie Rose tonight that he tried to convince Apple to put a Qualcomm radio in the Newton PDA during the 90s, but was shot down.

As he told it on Rose’s interview show tonight, Jacobs then took his personal Newton over to Palm, taped it to a Palm Pilot brochure (which was shaped just like one of the company’s PDAs), and began negotiations to put Palm’s operating system in a Qualcomm-powered smartphone.

That device ended being the Qualcomm PDQ, which has long been forgotten, but remains an important milestone in the journey to the smartphone as we know it. The PDQ could be considered the first smartphone, since it combined a mobile (and app-focused) operating system with cellular connectivity.

Developing, refresh for updates.

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