We all use them in our daily lives. Some of us wouldn’t be able to live without them. Cellphones provide us with the ability to contact anyone at any time. They also have developed to become portable search engines literally providing us with knowledge in an instant.
Many of us have seen them develop, getting smaller with each year, and now slowly getting bigger. But how many of you know the actual history of the cellphone.
In 1917 Eric Tigerstedt actually applied for a patent on “pocket sized telephone,” however, the first cellphone wasn’t actually produced until 1973. Motorola produced the first mobile phone, that wasn’t exactly mobile. These first cellphones only allowed phone calls and were not equipped to do anything else.
Photo: Engadget
The original Motorola DynaTac supposedly took 10 hours to charge for a mere 30 minutes of talking time. The phone cost around 4,000 dollars, an extremely luxurious item. During the 80’s this model began to be commercially produced and in the next few years they improved the model with minor adjustments.
Photo: Android Authority
It wasn’t until the 90’s that developers started to release a 2nd generation of mobile phones. In 1992 the IBM Simon was released, this phone is considered the first ever smartphone. The phone acted more as a planner with the added ability to make phone calls. You could create task lists and store contacts, but that was all that Simon could handle. This hand held device retailed at around $900 and sold close to 50,000 units. Simon essentially paved the way for many smartphones to come.
Photo: The Atlantic
The 90’s also began the era that portability became important. Nokia, one of the biggest cellphone manufacturers in the 90’s and early 2000’s really worked on slimming down mobile phones to make them more user friendly. Once we entered the 2000’s cell phones began to become more accessible to everyone.
Photo: Read Write
Blackberry has been around since the late 90’s, but they finally became a household name around 2003. The Blackberry introduced email and internet to mobile devices, paving the way for smartphones.
Photo: BGR
There have been many phones in between the blackberry and the iPhone. Love Apple or hate them they have produced one of the most iconic phones to exist. In 2007, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone that would cost between $500-600. This announcement marked the beginning of a series of developments that led us to the much bigger and slimmer touch screen phones.
Cellphones have come a long since their early developments. The original cellphone acted as a Walkie Talkie and only allowed phone calls, over the years we’ve developed phones to include much more than the ability to make a call. Now, many of us use smartphones in our daily lives to communicate with our friends and family and they’ve become much more accessible than their ancestors.