Although most of us feel like we couldn't live without our mobile phones, they've not really been in existence for very long. Mobile phones, particularly the smartphones that have become our inseparable companions today, are relatively new. However, the history of mobile phones goes back to when a US Patent was issued in Kentucky for a wireless telephone. The very first mobile phones were not really mobile phones at all.
They were two-way radios that allowed people like taxi drivers and the emergency services to communicate. Instead of relying on base stations with separate cells and the signal being passed from one cell to another , the first mobile phone networks involved one very powerful base station covering a much wider area. Motorola, on 3 April were first company to mass produce the the first handheld mobile phone.
These early mobile phones are often referred to as 0G mobile phones, or Zero Generation mobile phones. Most phones today rely on 3G or 4G mobile technology.
Latest mobile phone deals. Mobile telephony has a long history that started off with experiments of communications from and to moving vehicle rather then handheld devices.
In later years, the main challenges have laid in the development of interoperable standard and coping with the explosive success and ever increasing demand for bandwidth and reliability. Due to the small number of radio frequencies available, the service quickly reached capacity. The device to install in the car used vacuum tube technology with rotary dial and weighed 40Kg.
Photo: Ericsson. It included engineers representing Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Its purpose was to develop a mobile phone system that, unlike the systems being introduced in the US, focused on accessibility. The group adopted the nordic model of cooperation and laid the foundation of an international standard.
Based on digital technology, it focused on interoperability across national boundaries and consequent different frequency bands, call quality and low costs.
Neil Papworth, aged 22 at the time was a developer for a telecom contractor tasked with developing a messaging service for Vodafone. The explosion in growth was in part driven the launch of the first pay as you go, non-contract phone service, Vodafone Prepaid, in Unlike their all-text predecessors emoticons, emojis are pictures. The first BlackBerry phone was also unveiled in Famous for its super-easy email service, BlackBerry handsets were seen as the ultimate business tool, allowing users to read and respond to emails from anywhere.
Naturally it was unscathed and went on to sell million units. The only snag? Nepal was one of the first countries in southern Asia to launch 3G services.
Now dubbed the O. G of Android phones, it was a long way from the high-end Android smartphones we use today. Not least because it retained a physical keyboard and a BlackBerry-style trackball for navigation. The technology, which was supplied by Huawei, achieved a peak downlink rate of Mbps. WhatsApp also launched that year, letting customers send and receive calls and messages via the internet.
The messaging system now has 1. Ten years later, Britons were sending a billion messages per month. In , British text volume reached its highest point, with billion sent in the UK alone. The free augmented reality game uses the smartphone camera and location to show Pokemon characters in the real world. Despite this, it still retained our favourite features from the original , including the iconic design, super-long battery life and even an updated version of Snake.
Needless to say, it stole the show at the Mobile World Congress MWC tech expo and was one of the biggest hits of the year. Apple marked ten years in the smartphone game with the all-screen iPhone X and ditched a physical home button for the first time. See the latest mobile phone deals. Specs included a monochrome LCD screen, extendable antenna and a memory capable of storing 99 phone numbers. The most expensive and desirable phone on the market at the time of its release, the StarTac debuted the clamshell design and was the lightest and smallest phone on the market.
For most of their history, "mobile" phones were mostly two-way radios that you installed on something that moved. In the s, German railroad operators began testing wireless telephones in their train cars, starting with military trains on a limited number of lines, before spreading to public trains a few years later. In , Zugtelephonie AG was founded as a supplier of mobile telephone equipment for use in trains, and the following year saw the first public introduction of wireless telephones for first-class passengers on major rail lines between Berlin and Hamburg.
The Second World War saw major advances in radio technology , with handheld radios coming into widespread use. These advances placed mobile radio systems in military vehicles around the same time, but technological limitations limited the quality of the systems significantly. This didn't stop companies from offering mobile telephone systems designed for use in automobiles in the s and s in America and elsewhere.
However, like their military counterparts, they came with serious drawbacks. They were large systems that required a lot of power, had limited coverage, and the networks weren't able to support more than a few active connections at a time. These limitations would hamper mobile phone technology for decades and put a ceiling on how fast the technology could be adopted by the public. The service was slow to take off, however, with only a few thousand customers in about localities in total.
The system required an operator at a switchboard to set up a connection and the users had to push a button to talk and let go of it to listen, making it more like a military radio than the existing telephone system that people were used to. The service was also expensive, and the number of channels available for active connections remained limited to as little as three channels in some places, and with a conversation taking up the entire channel for the duration of the call, there could never be more active conversations than there were available channels.
Motorola wasn't the only company innovating this year; Nokia also released a device with a groundbreaking feature. The Nokia was the first cell phone to feature a WAP browser that allowed the user to browse the internet.
It combined the features of a cell phone with those of an MP3 player, thus providing the user with the option of playing music. That same year, the Benefon Esc! The crown for the first camera phone is somewhat contested. It featured a front-facing camera and only had enough memory to store 20 photos. Over the years that followed, other manufacturers began to release their own camera phones, which improved in both megapixel count and storage size.
By the turn of the millennium, phones had become even smaller and lighter. It was in the year that the Nokia was launched. As well as becoming one of the most iconic phones of all time, it remains one of the biggest-selling cell phones to this day.
The first Bluetooth cell phone was the Ericsson T39, after which other manufacturers started introducing this technology as well. The Nokia was the first mass-market Symbian OS cell phone and the first Nokia cell phone with a built-in camera. Then in , innovation came in the form of the Sanyo SCP, a phone which allowed photos to be seen on the screen, rather than having to plug the device into a computer. This groundbreaking phone also featured dual color displays and a camera with flash.
And again, the phone kept getting smaller and more capable, with Nokia and Motorola dominating markets across the world. The camera game also got a level-up with Nokia introducing the , their first smartphone with a 1-megapixel camera. They also introduced the first true global roaming phone, the Nokia The first waterproof phone popped up in This was the Casio G'zOne, which could sustain being submerged up to 1-meter depth. One of the biggest events in cell phone history took place in The first iPhone, known as iPhone 2G, was launched and blew everyone away due to the removal of most physical hardware buttons in favor of a touch-based interface.
The introduction of the Android operating system was criticized due to its lack of functionality and third-party software, but was, nevertheless, considered innovative due to its notifications system and integration with Google's services. The first release of the Long Term Evolution LTE standard was commercially deployed in Norway and Sweden in and has since become common throughout most parts of the world.
The first phone to come with the free Google Maps Navigator installed was the Motorola Droid which was also released that same year. The following years saw further innovation.. Apple released the iPhone 4 , which introduced the Retina display as well as FaceTime.
It was also the first iPhone to have a front-facing camera. In , Samsung launched its new flagship — the Samsung Galaxy S. At the time, it was the thinnest smartphone at 9. Many other pioneering features came to market in Motorola launched the Razr, which was, at the time, the thinnest phone at only 7. Sony Ericsson went after the mobile gaming market and created the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play , a game-console-like phone focused on the gaming experience.
Motorola focused on adding security features and had released the Motorola Atrix, the first phone to feature a fingerprint sensor. In , Xiaomi launched their first phone — the Xiaomi Mi 1 — which was only available in Asian markets.
A year later, Samsung came out with the Galaxy S3 , a phone with a personal voice assistant of their own, as well as novel features such as eye-tracking.
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