The History of Mobile Phones

From the picture above, you can see just how much the mobile phone has changed over the past 30 years.    

Motorola was the first company to produce the handheld mobile phone in 1973. Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment – weighing in at 1.1kg and measuring 23cm long, 13cm deep and 4.45cm wide, to Dr Joel Engel of Bell labs. The phone offered talk time of 30 minutes and took 10 hours to recharge.

 

Britain’s first mobile telephone call was made on January 1st 1985 and the first text message was sent via computer 24 years ago simply saying “Merry Christmas”. The original 160-character size limit for text was the brainchild of German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand. He arrived at the number by typing a series of random questions into his typewriter, and after counting the characters, he found 160 to be “perfectly sufficient” to write in any question or thoughts one may have.

There are 40,000 masts today compared to just five (all in London), 30 years ago. Britons make over 130 million mobile phone calls every day while messaging app WhatsApp, sees 50 billion messages per day, more than all SMS combined.

Then:

Nokia’s 3210

The Nokia 3210 is one of the most popular mobile phones in history with over 160 million sold. Released in 1999, it ditched the antenna and was one of the first to allow picture messaging which was a huge selling point.

Now:

 

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced a revolutionary touchscreen smartphone known as the iPhone in 2007 with the slogan “Apple reinvents the phone”. Steve described the iPhone as a combination of 3 devices: a “widescreen iPod with touch controls”, a “breakthrough internet communicator” and a “revolutionary mobile phone.”

Since the release of the First Generation phone, iPhones have exploded in popularity with a further 9 models being created.