A
BRIEF HISTORY OF MOBILE PHONE
Mobile
phones have come a long way in the last seventy years, so be thankful yours
fits in your pocket. Maybe one day it will even be able to bend like a piece of
thin plastic. Maybe you won't even have to touch it, doing all of your
multitasking from cellular implants. But seventy years ago, you'd be lugging a
25-pound 'portable' phone on your back, with very limited 5-mile range.
1938
Not quite what you would consider a mobile phone, the SCR-194
and 195 were the first portable AM radios, produced by the U.S. Army Signal
Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, NJ. Considered the first
"walkie talkie," these devices weighed roughly 25 pounds and had a
5-mile range. They were widely used for infantry battalion and company
intercommunication during World War II.
1940
Next came the SCR-300 radio transceiver, developed for
the U.S. Military by Motorola. This time a portable FM radio, it weighed
anywhere from 32 to 38 pounds with a 3-mile range. It replaced the SCR-194 and
195 with nearly 50,000 units used in World War II by Allied Forces.
1942
Motorola produced the first "handie talkie" for the
U.S., labeled SCR-536. 130,000 units were manufactured and used during the war.
Back to AM, this handheld version shed the fat off the previous two
transceivers, weighing only 5 pounds. But its land range was only 1-mile (3
miles over water). Moving away from military-grade portable radios, we get to
the mobile radio telephones
1946
Bell System introduced the first commercial mobile telephone
service, called the Mobile Telephone System (MTS). The original
equipment was large, weighing 80 pounds (not quite what you'd call mobile) with
limited calling bands available from AT&T. The service wasn't cheap
either—costing $30 a month (roughly $330 today) with additional per call
charges. Not really intended for regular Joe Blows, these devices were used by
utilities, truck fleet operators, and reporters.
1956
Ericsson's Mobile System A (MTA) was the first partly
automatic mobile system for automobiles. First used by Sweden, the unit weighed
a whopping 88 pounds. Again, "mobile" is kind of a misnomer,
considering it is equivalent to almost 300 iPhones!
1964
With the adaption of Bell's newer pre-cellular Improved
Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), auto owners saw lighter, more advanced
mobile car phones with push buttons. This one by Motorola weighed 40 pounds,
half as much of the original units from the '40s. Over the years, they managed
to get down into the 20-pound range. But they never managed to get into the
hands of Joe Blow, with a still-hefty price and rationed service throughout the
nation.
1973
With a prototype of the DynaTAC (DYNamic Adaptive Total
Area Coverage) portable phone, former Motorola Vice President Martin Cooper
made the first private, practical mobile phone call in a non-vehicle setting.
Who would he call? His rival at Bell Labs, Joel S. Engel.
1982
With the impressive size of the DynaTAC prototype, it's
disappointing to see Nokia's Mobira Senator weighing in at 22 pounds. It
launched during the world's first fully automatic international cellular
service—NMT—the first-generation (1G) of mobile communications.
1983
10 years later after the prototype, Motorola's DynaTAC
cellular phone was made available to the public, weighing under 2 pounds, but
costing nearly $4,000 (almost $9,000 today)—which is why it was strictly for
the Gordon Gekkos of the world. It worked on AMPS, North America's first 1G
analog service, launched first by Ameritech in Chicago.
1984
Back to larger mobile devices, the Mobira Talkman brought
longer talk time at cheaper costs. The DynaTAC could only manage 60 minutes of
talk time, but this miniature beast gave hours or voice-to-voice communication
1989
Next up was Motorola's MicroTAC, which introduced the first
flip phone design. The hardware was place in a hinged section of the phone,
reducing the phone's size when not in use. It was truly the world's first
pocket phone.
1992
The Motorola
International 3200 became the first hand-sized digital mobile phone that used
2G digitally encrypted technology (unveiled in 1991 as GSM).
1993
Perhaps the
world's first smartphone, IBM Simon was a mobile phone, pager, fax machine and
PDA, all rolled into one. It included a calendar, address book, clock,
calculator, notepad, email, gamers and a touchscreen with QWERTY keyboard. It
originally sold for $899, which would be just over $1,300 nowadays. You may
remember Simon from Sandra Bullock's The Net.
1994
Car phones
remained popular, despite their smaller pocket-sized versions, but Motorola's
Bag Phone (2900) was the car phone to have due to its long talk time, great
battery life and superior signal range. They first worked with 1G networks, but
eventually crossed over into 2G territory.
1996
Still
shrinking the line of TACs, Motorola unveiled the first clamshell mobile phone
with StarTAC. It improved the folding feature by collapsing in half, which is
why it's called "clamshell"—because it resembles a clam opening and
closing shut. It ran on 1G networks, but eventually crossed over into the world
of 2G. It's said to be inspired by the communicator from the original Star Trek
series.
1997
The Simon
was good, but the Nokia 9000 Communicator was what really brought on the
smartphone era. It was the first cell phone that could also be called a
mini-computer (though it had limited web access). When opened, the longways
clamshell design revealed an LCD screen and full QWERTY keyboard—the first on a
mobile phone.
1998
The Nokia 8810 was
the first cell phone without an external antenna whip or stub-antenna, possibly
paving the way for iPhones and DROIDs. It also made mobile phones more
aesthetically pleasing, with its sliding keypad cover.
1999
One of the most
popular mobile phones in history was the Nokia 3210, with over 160 million
sold. It was one of the first to allow picture messages, but only preinstalled
ones like "Happy Birthda,y" and was one of the first to be marketing
toward young people.
1999
Nokia's 7110 was the
first cell phone to incorporate Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), which gave
mobile users web access for simple devices—a stripped-down, mostly text
version, but a revolutionary step for mobile internet.
1999
GeoSentric was
responsible for the world's first mobile phone and a GPS navigator integrated
in one product—the Benefon Esc! It was splashproof, greyscale, and allowed
users to load maps to trace position and movement.
1999
In Japan, Kyocera's
Visual Phone (VP-201) was the first to have a built-in camera, but it was
designed primarily as a peer-to-peer video phone, as opposed to Sharp's the
next year...
2000
Sharp was first to the camera phone market with their J-SH04
(J-Phone), released by J-Mobile in Japan. It offered a mere 0.1 megapixel
resolution.
Some like
to give credit to Olympus for being the first camera to transmit digital images
over a cellular network with their Deltis VC-1100. Others prefer Philippe
Kahn's story of rigging up a camera to a cell phone with wires to send images
of his newborn baby. But the J-SH04 was the first commercially
available cell phone to have an integrated CCD sensor, with the Sha-Mail
(Picture-Mail) infrastructure. This was the start of what we know as MMS.
2002
Not too far from the
J-Phone, the Sanyo 5300 from Sprint was the first camera phone sold in North
America.
2002
RIM's BlackBerry 5810 wasn't the first BlackBerry device, but it
was the first to incorporate a mobile phone into their popular brand of data-only
devices.
Professionals
who needed immediate access to their emails and schedules were the main target
for RIM, but the built-in phone made it appealing to everyone. The downside? No
speaker or microphone.
2002
One of the first phones to equip a fully functional web experience
and integrate an instant messaging client (AIM) was the Danger Hiptop in 2002,
later re-branded the T-Mobile Sidekick.
Its
messaging features and keyboard made it one of the best selling phones in the
deaf community. Also new was an LCD screen that rotated and flipped to reveal a
large QWERTY keyboard.
2002
Perhaps surpassing the BlackBerry achievements, Microsoft's Pocket
PC Phone Edition started spreading across PDAs like wildfire, including the HP
Jornada 928 Wireless Digital Assistant, combining the best of the PDA with
integrated wireless voice and data capabilities.
It was a
nice addition to the older Windows Mobile Classic devices, which essential ran
a mini-version of Windows XP.
2002
Another PDA adding
phone support was Palm's Treo 180 by Handspring, running the Palm OS.
2004
The next highly popular device was a camera phone called the
Motorola RAZR, which was first marketed as a "fashion" phone in 2004,
selling 50 million units by mid-2006.
It helped
give cell phones a new look, which were getting stale with the same ol' boring
designs. Though nothing revolutionary, its looks did more than impress.
2005
The first Palm
smartphone to operate outside of the Palm OS was the Treo 700w, powered by
Windows Mobile. It was a great alternative for users who needed access to
Microsoft software on the go.
2005
Believe it or not, the iPhone wasn't the first cell phone to
have Apple's iTunes music player integrated. It was the Motorola ROKR E1, but
it only could manage 100 songs at a time—not quite the same as an iPhone.
2007
In 2007, Steve Jobs
introduced the Apple iPhone, a revolutionary touchscreen smartphone. It wasn't
the first smartphone, but it was the first to get the user interface right,
eventually adapting 3G technology (which was already available since 2001).
2008
The first smartphone
to run Google's Android OS was the HTC Dream slider smartphone. It featured a
QWERTY keyboard, full HTML web browser, Gmail, YouTube and more, and paved the
way for phones like the Nexus One and Motorola DROID.
2010
The HTC EVO 4G from
Sprint was the first cellular phone to meet 4G standards, running on the WiMAX
network. It was sold powered by Android 2.1 and had one of the largest
touchscreen displays, an 8MP camera, HD video capture, HDMI output, Mobile
Hotspot capability and HTC Sense.
