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What is the history of the mobile phone?

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Date: Wednesday 7th August 2013

Many of us (me included) feel like our mobile phone is simply an extension of our body, something impossible to live without. Our phones are important as the clothes we wear and the food we eat, even though mobile phones actually haven’t been around that long. Mobile phones in their current form have only been around 10-15 years.

It can be said that mobile phones started their existence forty years ago as in car telephones. These phones were astronomically expensive and needed to be in a car to hold the battery. The world’s first ever truly mobile phone was made in the April of 1973; it was made by Martin Cooper who was a senior engineer at Motorola at the time. The phone however, wasn’t particularly what you would class as mobile. Weighing in at over 1kg, resembling a house brick and taking ten hours to charge in return for 30 minutes call time, it isn’t surprising that there were a few non-believers.

Six years later Motorola released its first mobile phone to the people, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. Impressive name, we are sure you’ll agree. This phone offered improvements over the last model; you had 30 minutes of talk time, six hours standby and could save up to the 30 contacts. Oh yeah, it had a slight drawback, it also cost over two and a half thousand pounds.

These phones weren’t actually designed for the masses; they were designed for the high flying yuppies of London. Del Boy in Only Fools & Horses even had an early mobile phone for when he wanted to give out a ‘Yuppie Image’ The 1990’s hosted the next important phase for mobile phone development, thanks to competitors entering the marketplace. The 1990’s saw the introduction of mobile phones from the following manufacturers; Samsung, Blackberry and Nokia.

It was in the year 2000 that Nokia released the Nokia 3310, and we loved it. Phones in the 2000’s came an incredibly long way. Samsung brought out the SGH-T100 which was the first phone with a colour LCD display in 2002 and then in 2004 Motorola released the Razr V3, the bestselling flip phone in history. Five years later, in 2008, Apple released a game changer, the iPhone 3G. This phone is responsible for changing the entire mobile industry and has set the standard for other mobile phone companies.

Today, in 2013 smartphone serve as our computer, our alarm clock, our calendar, our notepad, our social media platforms, and our means of shopping… everything! This reliance on technology has led to a condition labelled ‘Nomophobia’ which is a fear of being without such technology. The condition is so serious, there are genuine technology rehabilitation centres popping up across America which deal with the condition... for a fee. If you couldn’t live without your mobile phone, why not purchase it a special mobile phone number here?

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