The Rise of the Mobile Phone

Although companies such as Motorola can trace back mobile phone calls to the early 1970’s it is only within the last 15 years that the mobile phone has become somewhat of a necessity in many societies across the globe. One of my earlier recollections of the mobile phone was in an earlier episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. On getting a new job, Will brags to his family and the audience that he has been given a mobile phone from his boss. This bombshell was greeted by disbelief by Uncle Phil and co whilst the audience cheered and whooped this amazing piece of technology that he had acquired. In the early 1990’s, owning a mobile phone guaranteed you status. You were rich, a high flier and fashionable. Today spotty 12 year old kids own about three each. My 74 year old grandmother, Rhoda, owns one. She topped up £10 in 2002 and currently has £6.60 credit, most of which was no doubt wasted checking her balance anyway.  Mobile Phones are easily replaced and recycled. Most 12 month contracts come with the promise of a new handset every year. In the 1960’s, if your television broke, you would send it off to get fixed. Today you would buy a new one without batting an eye lid and the same is of the mobile. I wouldn’t mind guessing that close to 100% of students at this university own a mobile, particularly when considering how often they go off in lectures. People regularly lose their phone, have it stolen or quite regularly break by dropping down the toilet on a night out. Over 4000 GCSE students are penalised per year for malpractice regarding the mobile phone, most commonly sneaking it into an exam room. By 2003, 90% of 15 to 34 year olds owned a mobile phone. As with the page on personal music players, I will brief chart the progress of the mobile phone since it became commercialised in the late 1970’s.

  • 1973: Motorola show off a prototype of the world’s first mobile phone. It weighed close to a kilogram and was over a foot long. It cost over £2000
  • 1982: Nokia introduce the first in a long and successful line of mobile phones. It weighed twice as much three average sized babies and was designed for use inside a car
  • 1983:  The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X  becomes commercially available and can store a whopping 30 numbers and boasted a cool one hour talk time
  • 1993: IBM and Bellsouth launch the Personal Communicator which was a phone, a pager, calculator and address book. It was a beast and weighed close to a kilogram
  • 1996: Motorola StarTAC is launched. The phone is small, attractive and light. Phones are increasingly concerned with fashion over function from this point.
  • 2001: First ‘Smart Phone’ launched by Treo. It cost over £200 and had 8MB of memory
  • 2002: Sanyo introduced first camera phone. The image quality is laughable compared to today. With 640 by 480, photos looked more like drawings
  • 2003: Danger Hiptop released and offered functional web browsing for the first time
  • 2003: Nokia go a step further than ‘Snake’ and ‘Bantumi’ when it offered the N-GAGE series which was a phone/gaming device. The idea failed to take off and was badly criticised
  • 2004: The Motorola Razr was the must have handset of the year with its extremely slim and modern design
  • 2005: Motorola incorporate Apples music software with the Rokr. Although limited to 100 songs and criticised for being slow to transfer material the phone represents just how far mobile technology had gone within a five years and was state of the art at the time
  • 2006: The BlackBerry Pearl boasts a camera/video camera, audio/video player, quality email and all the standard features of other handsets
  • 2007: iPhone launched in summer and does not include a numeric keypad. Has the phone set a trend? It is hard to say for sure but we are likely to find out very quickly such is the competitive nature of the market and vast technological improvements which allow such developments