WARNING: if you’re not super interested in cell phone history, I would leave now 
If you’ve ever seen a “mobile” phone appear in a movie more than a decade old, you probably chuckled at how clunky the old designs used to be. There’s no doubt that we’ve come a long way with mobile phone designs and capabilities, stretching from the hideous bricks of the 1980s to the sleek iPhone generation phones of the 2010s. In this article, we’ll briefly run through how the mobile phone has evolved.
Phone technologies were spreading out starting in the 1970s, and the result was that a few mobile phone concepts were developed. The most prominent were the car phone, pager, and early renditions of mobile phone devices.
While these briefcase-sized mobile phones did technically start the industry, it was the pager that created the design concept for mobile phone devices.
‘Brick Phone’
And so, the bricks were born. Nokia and Motorola were two of the first companies on the market. Phones like the DynaTAC 8000X from Motorola featured analog calling, and one great special feature: if you ever needed a bludgeoning weapon, this massive handset would do just fine.
Over the course of the 1980s, the overall size shrunk significantly, and we moved into a fairly bulk flip phone. The first of its kind, the MicroTAC 9800X — release in 1987 — could actually fit into your pocket, assuming that your pants were a fairly lose fit.
This is the point where higher-up executives and travel-centric businesspeople started investing in the products.
Motorala’s Forward Leap
Motorola made the next big step forward in 1992, with the first digital mobile phone, the International 3200. This version again slimmed down the phone’s overall size, but it wasn’t until Nokia’s release that same year that cell phones became viable for the public market.
Nokia’s 1011 phone was certainly bulky when compared to the smartphones of today, but it earned public appeal for the first time.
Over the next few years, a variety of companies stepped into the market, including Bell South. Innovations over the course of the nineties included the first PDA features (1993), the first cell phone screens (1996), the first slide phone (1996), the first phones with full keyboards (1996), the first palm-sized phones (1998), and the first phones with integrated text-messaging (1999).
Ahh, The Year Y2K
By the year 2000, the modern technologies really started to emerge. Benefon introduced the first GPS navigation with a phone, Ericsson gave us the first touch screen device, and Nokia gave us the first device with music storage.
The smart phone was born, however, in 2003, when the Blackberry — as well as a line of less known PDA/handset combination — hit the mainstream market.
Starting in 2004, we saw a split between slim phones like the RAZR and smartphones like the BlackBerry PERL. The two began closing in on each other, though, at the time of the iPhone’s introduction in 2007, when Apple showed that devices could be both slim and smart.
Since that time, developers have been working hard to improve the intelligence and sleek design of modern smartphones. With Android, Microsoft, and Apple all pushing for innovation, there’s no telling what exciting innovations tomorrow will bring.
If you’re interested in checking out an interactive and interesting IG showcasing the evolution of mobile phones, check out this neat IG on Lookout’s blog. Click the badge to go there.
