Today we look at some of the firsts of the mobile industry - we are talking the handset, SMS, Camera, Bluetooth you name it, all those features had a beginning and that is where we are going today.
So here we go;
1.
The first call ever made from a handheld mobile
phone, was on April 3, 1973,
in New York, by Martin Cooper,
a vice president at Motorola
to his rival, AT&T Joel Engell who headed Bell labs with whom they had
been in competition to create the world’s first cell phoneThat first conversation went like:
“Joel, I’m calling you from a cellular
phone, a real cellular phone, a handheld, portable, real cellular phone.”
2.
That call was made from a prototype dubbed DynaTAC
phone (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) which:-
- Weighed 2.5
pounds (Roughly 1 kg))
- Was 9 inches
long, 5 inches deep and 1.75 inches wide
- Had Talk time
of about 30 minutes
- Had Recharge
time of 10 hours
- Could only
hold 30 contacts in its limited memory
- Was popularly
referred to as THE BRICK because of it is weight (1; Kg!!!)
3.
A version of the above phone was produced and
went commercial for the first time on March
6, 1983. It was called DynaTAC 8000X and it :-
- Cost $3,995
(about 331,500Kshs by current exchange rates)
- Weighed 28
ounces (790g)
- Was 10 inches
(25cms) high (minus Antenna)
- Had 30
minutes of talk time and 8 hours standby
- Had LED
Display for dialing
- Could only
hold 30 contacts in its limited memory
- Recall of one
of 30 phone numbers
- Had A million
users within seven years (by 1990)
4.
The first PDA/Phone
combo was the The IBM Simon
Personal Communicator which was made available to consumers in August 1994. This phone combined
the features of cell phone, pager, fax machine and computer into an 18 ounce
black brick.
5.
The IBM Simon was also the first touchscreen smartphone. It had icons you tapped or
poked with a stylus, for email, calculator, calendar, clock and a game called
Scramble. It cost $899 (appr. 77,000Kshs) and sold approximately 50,000units
before it went out of production.
6.
The first
camera phone with inbuilt camera was sold in 2000 in Japan, a J-Phone
model J-SH04 made by Sharp. By 2003,
more camera phones were sold worldwide than stand-alone digital cameras.
7.
The first
commercial SMS message was send over the Vodafone GSM Network in the UK
on 3rd December 1992 –
it read “Happy Christmas.
8.
There is debate over what was the first colour screen device,
but the first popular colour screen phone was Sony Ericsson T68k – widely accepted and praised in the
market.
9.
The first mobile phone to have built-in Bluetooth wireless
technology is the Sony Ericsson T36
(according to Ericsson)
10.
Not forgetting Blackberry which revolutionized
the way people send emails by utilizing the push technology which enables mails
to be pushed directly to a Blackberry device so that it arrives instantly like
an SMS.
And there you have it folks, one can only imagine what is still brewing in the kitchen.. I personally am excited to see what next...
