History of mobile phones
Although most of us feel like we couldn't live without our mobile
phones, they've not really been in existence for very long. In fact,
mobile phones as we know them today have only been around in the last 10
to 15 years.
The first mobile phones
Mobile phones, particularly the smartphones that have become our
inseparable companions today, are relatively new. However, the origin of
the mobile phone goes back to 1908 when a US Patent was issued in
Kentucky for a
wireless telephone.
The story of the
modern mobile phone really begins in the 1940s when engineers working at AT&T developed cells for mobile phone base stations.
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.
These early mobile phones are often referred to as 0G mobile phones,
or Zero Generation mobile phones. Most phones today rely on 3G or
third-generation mobile technology.
Compare all the latest mobile phones at uSwitch now.
The development of mobile phone technology
A Motorola employee called Martin Cooper is widely considered to be a
key player in the history of mobile phones, inventing the first mobile
phone that was fit for practical use. Handsets that could be used in a
vehicle had been developed prior to Martin Cooper’s phone, but his was
the first usable truly
portable mobile telephone. Cooper made mobile phone history in April 1973 when he made the first ever call on a handheld mobile phone.
Landmarks in mobile phone history
- Japan became the first country to have a city-wide commercial cellular mobile phone network in 1979.
- The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system launched in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland in 1981.
- The next major step in mobile phone history was in the mid-eighties
with the First Generation (1G) fully automatic cellular networks were
introduced.
- The first ever mobile phone to be approved by the FCC (Federal
Communications Commission) in the USA was the Motorola DynaTac in 1983.
Compare all Motorola mobile phones at uSwitch now.
Modern mobiles
Mobile telephony developed in leaps and bounds over the next decade,
particularly with the arrival of handover technology. This allowed users
to keep their connections as they travelled between base stations – so
as a user walked from one mobile phone mast to another, the connection
and conversation would not drop or be interrupted.
The birth of the Second Generation (2G) mobile phones was in Finland
in 1993. It was also the year that the first SMS text messages were
sent and that
data services began to appear on mobile phones.
Mobiles that we use today are 3G mobiles, or Third Generation
mobiles. 3G launched in 2001 and allowed operators to offer a huge range
of advanced services such as
video calling and HSPA data transmission.