Cybiko

Cybiko Inc., a startup founded by David Yang, test-marketed its "inter-tainment" handheld in New York in April 2000 and went nationwide that May at $139. The pitch was aimed squarely at teenagers: a pocket computer with a rubber QWERTY keyboard, a monochrome screen, and — the real hook — its own two-way radio text messaging. Cybikos within about a hundred meters could message each other and join wireless chatrooms. This was texting before anyone's phone could do it, and over 430 official games and apps were free to download.

For one school year it worked. By the end of 2000, the Cybiko Classic had sold over 500,000 units, and a slimmer Xtreme model followed. But the momentum faded — a planned London launch on September 15, 2001, was canceled after the September 11 attacks, one more blow to a company already losing steam — and Cybiko pivoted to writing software for mobile phones. It announced the end of production in 2003.

The legacy is oddly pure: the kids who had one remember schoolyard wireless chat that nobody else believed existed, a private network that lived and died inside a single homeroom radius. The phones everyone got a few years later just made official what Cybiko had already proven.