The world of cell phones has certainly come a long way since the days of the Zack Morris brick phone. These days, we’re very much ensconced in a realm occupied by giant touchscreens, accelerometers, location-based services, and instant messaging. It wasn’t always this way and we need to pay homage to the devices that paved the way for companies to “reinvent” these technologies for today.
Follow me as we take a stroll down the history of mobile phones, unearthing many of the major milestones and cell phone firsts that revolutionized the industry over the years.
First iTunes Phone (Not the iPhone)
It seems that everyone is in love with the Apple iPhone these days, but ironically enough, the iPhone wasn’t even the first iTunes-enabled mobile phone. With no experience in the world of cell phones, Apple first got its feet wet by partnering up with the experts at Motorola. The result? The Motorola ROKR E1 was revealed to the world as the first iTunes-connected cell phone in 2005. It was largely a re-badged version of the existing Motorola E398 candybar phone (also known as the E790) and it was the first to be integrated with the iTunes music player.
This way, the music you purchased in the iTunes Store could be enjoyed on the go with a cell phone. The interface on the ROKR E1 mimicked that of the iPod, but the firmware limited it to storing no more than 100 songs at a time. Sales figures, understandably, were less than stellar and the ROKR goes down in history as one of Apple’s seldom spoken about disasters.
First Camera Phone (It’s From Japan!)
It may seem harder to find a cell phone without an embedded camera nowadays, but there was a time when mobile phones lacked picture-taking capabilities. That changed with the arrival of the Sharp J-SH04 in 2000.
Launched through J-Phone (which later became SoftBank Mobile), this was the first commercially available camera phone in the world. It offered a mere 0.1 megapixel resolution and sold for about US$500. It was preceded by a custom camera phone created by Phillipe Kahn in 1997.
In North America, the first camera phone was the Sanyo SCP-5300 through Sprint in 2002. While camera phones still aren’t quite as good as real digital cameras (in general), devices like the HTC Incredible with its 8MP camera are getting awfully close.
First QWERTY Keyboard on a Cell Phone
At some point, mobile phones became so much more than just mobile phones. They became mobile computers and we needed more than a numeric keypad. The QWERTY keyboard entered the arena with the Nokia 9000 Communicator in 1996.
While closed, this phone looked much like other bar-style phones of the day (aside from being a LOT bigger), but it opened up to reveal a secondary display and the full QWERTY keyboard. This form factor remains popular today for many messaging phones.
In addition to offering the first QWERTY keyboard on a cell phone, the Nokia 9000 Communicator also boasted an Intel 24MHz processor, 8MB of memory, and plenty of PDA-esque functions. Needless to say, today’s Nokia smartphones are a little more advanced than what was offered back in the day.
First Mobile Phone with a Color Display
Just as moving from black and white to color totally changed how we enjoyed watching television, the same can be said about cell phones. Unearthing the first mobile phone with a color display took quite a bit of rummaging around the Internet, but I am reasonably positive that it is the Sony Ericsson T68.
Also sold as the Sony Ericsson T68i, this phone blew the world away in 2000, offering a 101 x 80 pixel display capable of showing a palette of 256 colors. Over the course of the next two years or so, it seemed like nearly every other phone adopted a color screen as well. Not surprisingly, the T68 pales in comparison to modern day devices like the Samsung Omnia HD, HTC Legend, and the “retina” display on the iPhone 4.
First PDA-Phone Combo Device (Touchscreen Too)
Smartphones may seem like a relatively recent development, giving us a way to update Twitter and send emails on the road, but they’ve actually been around longer than you may think. No, it didn’t start with BlackBerry. Nope, not Palm Treo or Windows CE either. Ladies and gents, you’re looking at the IBM Simon Personal Communicator, initially offered by BellSouth way back in 1993.
It’s not really a smartphone in the contemporary sense of the word, but it was the first device to combine PDA functionality with a mobile phone.Interestingly enough, the IBM Simon is also the first phone to feature a touchscreen, predating even the Ericsson R380 (2000). While the iPhone certainly popularized the touchscreen cell phone, it was far from the first to offer that feature.
First with Internet Access on the Go
What about surfing the Internet? I’m a little lost when I’m at my computer without web access and the same thing is starting to happen with my phone if I lose a data connection. And this all started in 1999 with the arrival of the Nokia 7110.
To be fair, this slider phone (featured in the Matrix movies) didn’t grant you access to the full HTML web as we know it today. Instead, it was the first device to let you surf through WAP (wireless access protocol) sites. These were the precursors to “mobile-friendly” websites and offer a mostly text-based experience. Contrast that to the “full web experience” you get on devices like the Motorola Droid and HTC EVO 4G today. The web on the phone really isn’t all that different from the web on the computer anymore.
More Notable Points in Cell Phone History
Other milestones achieved along the way? The BlackBerry 5810 was launched in 2002, representing the first BlackBerry with integrated voice cell phone functionality. In 1999, the Benefon Esc! was released as the first phone with GPS integration. Sprint got the first MP3 phone with the Samsung SPH-M100 Uproar in 1999.
And who can possibly forget the Apple iPhone 3G in 2008. The first iPhone was alright, I suppose, but it’s the iPhone 3G that introduced us to the App Store. That totally changed the way we got apps on our smartphones, paving the way for Android Market (October 2008), BlackBerry App World (April 2009), Nokia Ovi Store (May 2009), Palm App Catalog (Jun 2009), and Windows Marketplace for Mobile (October 2009).
What will be the next huge innovation in the cell phone industry? We’ll have to wait and find out.
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