Tokyo Thrift is a column on The Verge where Sam Byford, news editor for Asia, trawls the second-hand market to explore the history, design, and culture of Japanese gadgets. It runs on the last Sunday of each month.

The MI-C1 was expensive considering its plastic build, but I’m surprised at how nice it looks and feels today. It’s easily pocketable at 136 x 80 x 15.5mm, and is reasonably light at 180g. The battery gives you up to 16 hours of use, according to Sharp, though comparing that to modern devices with screens you can actually see in the dark isn’t quite fair.

The screen was the main selling point of the MI series; 1996’s MI-10 was the first PDA with a color screen, and the MI-C1’s 640 x 480 panel was said to be anti-reflective for better ease of use outdoors. It does look pretty great outside in the sun, but the lack of backlight means it’s very hard to use inside.

What could you do in those 16 hours? A lot of what you can do with a smartphone today. If you tethered the MI-C1 to a phone, or hooked it up to its own dedicated modem, you got access to a web browser (HTML 3.2-compliant!), email, and news services. You could dock it with a PC and sync data from Outlook and Excel. There was all the built-in PDA software you’d expect, like a notes app with handwriting recognition, a dictionary, an address book (and a separate app to emulate business cards), a planner, and so on. The MI-C1 even has a version of the exact same train timetable app I use on iOS and Android today.

The MI-C1 is a really impressive device for what it is

The CE-AG06 digital camera card was also pretty cool. It only took pictures in 640 x 480 VGA resolution, but you had full manual focus control by twisting the lens, and the camera itself could pivot 180 degrees for some ‘90s selfie action. It also plugged right into the M1-C1’s CompactFlash slot, meaning you could get the photos off it the same way you would have with most other cameras at the time.

The MI-C1 is a really impressive device for what it is, and it does make me wonder why, if Sharp saw the potential of high-end touchscreen pocket computing this early, it didn’t make serious moves into the smartphone market before the ship had already sailed. Perhaps it didn’t want to cannibalize its flip phone and PDA businesses, being a serious player in both markets around the turn of the millennium. Or maybe the issue was software; Sharp turned to Linux and then Windows Mobile for its later Zaurus models, and it’s hard to see the company returning with a proprietary operating system that would have garnered the same level of support as iOS or Android.

The Zaurus line ended production in 2008, but Sharp returned the next year with the NetWalker series, a spiritual successor to the Zaurus with keyboard and touch models running Ubuntu. That didn’t last too long, and now Sharp makes Android phones, mostly for the Japanese market and occasionally with standout features like the bezelless Aquos Crystal or the bizarre bipedal RoboHon.

Oh, and it still makes flip phones, too.