Smartphone Firsts - Who Beat the rest to the punch?

Ever wondered who came up with that cool feature you love so much on your smartphone? The one you can't do without or most times take for granted...well a lot has gone into shaping the mobile industry and driving innovation thus giving us the current product that has become such an attachement to our lives that we cant imagine life without it.

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 3^rd 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...