Now it’s hard to imagine a life without mobile phones and they have only been available for a short period of time.
The first mobile device emerged from the Motorola labs in 1973, weighing about 4kg, taking 10 hours to charge, and allowing 30 minutes of talk time. This was the beginning of what was to become one of the world’s biggest technological advances.
The 1980s to the 1990s, phones progressively got smaller. Looking back at the images of phones in the eighties conjures images of large, bulky phones with long impractical aerials. The nineties signified a move to a sleeker and more pocket-friendly option.
Who can forget the faithful Nokia 3310? The indestructible phone known to many of us. Flip phones and phones with keypads started to become more popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In 2007, a phone came along that would change technology as we know it now. The iPhone was launched on June 29th 2007 and was the beginning of the mass move to smartphone devices.
With unlimited capabilities and new apps developed daily, the phone of the moment is undoubtedly the smartphone. In the first quarter of 2020, more than 336 million smartphones were sold and sales are set to rise as more affordable options are launched in the developing world.
The look and feel of smartphones have arguably come full circle by in some ways mimicking earlier models, with a move to larger (but usually thinner) devices. Screens in many cases are getting bigger and bigger, with ‘phablets’ (phone or tablet hybrids) becoming ever popular.
It’s not easy to say what phones in 2115 will look like and we can only imagine what they will be capable of.