Sure, but they were giant beasts with limited functionality. My first boss's wife had one for her real estate business. It came in a shoulder bag. The investment that produced today's smart phones and infrastructure required broader access.

That cell phone cost as much as modern smart phones despite not adjusting for inflation as well. That was just to pay, they were so expensive per minute to use that most who had one avoided using it if they had other options. Which is to say real estate agents had them and they tried to keep all calls to under the first incoming minute free.

The mobile phones they had were absolute garbage, service was abysmal, and the security was non existent.

There was no way to get to a smartphone without cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment in silicon, software, network rollouts, and so on. A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.

The very wealthy cannot get things that are that special and it’s actually pretty amazing. Warren Buffet has called out several times that he lives like a regular middle class American and the main exception is flying private, but if were forced to choose he would dump the jet over the iPhone.

> A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.

Oh? What d'you call this, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

Now, granted, most very rich people would probably not have _wanted_ one of these.

That’s not a smartphone. Re-read what I wrote. No amount of money would have produced anything close to an iPhone.

The average rural farmer in India has instant access to a world of information and entertainment at his fingertips 24/7 via his phone

Even just 30 years ago the most a billionaire would have were staff who would find information (at a far slower speed) from large libraries and copies of broadcast TV and most films available relatively quickly (perhaps even same day)

A mobile phone today is a world away from Dick Tracy's radio watch, or even a nokia 3210 on a digital network in a western city