Cell Phones, Industry Sector ELECTRONICS

CELL PHONES

History

1910 Lars Magnus Ericsson (founder of the company Ericsson) was retired. However in 1910 Lars' wife wanted to do a lot of travelling in the car, so Lars Ericsson decided to put a phone handset in the car. When ever they needed to use the phone they just pulled over near some telegraph lines, using 2 long sticks they hooked the telephone in the car to the telegraph wires. By doing this they could then connect to the local telephone exchange. This is the first known use of a portable phone in the public.

1940's The first commercial use of mobile radio telephones started during the 1940's.

It was during this time period that an early and basic version of the Code Division Multiple Access (more commonly known as CDMA, in today's era), was being developed. This was being developed and used in the military communications radio system. The reason the military used this system was that it was too hard to decode.

1946 in the US, AT&T and Southern Bell introduced the first American commercial mobile radio- telephone service. Unlike today's mobile phones, these phones weren't as portable, they were just car phones. How the phone worked back was different from today's mobile, the handset didn't have any numerical buttons on the handset. The way you made a call was by lifting the handset up and talking to an operator who would switch you through, it was a very basic system.

1950's Europe started their first car phone, in Stockholm. This system was very similar to the American system.

1970s Dr Martin Cooper, and his team at Motorola, made the first prototype mobile (Cellular) handset. In April of that year he made the first phone call. It was 1975/09/16 that Dr Martin Cooper patented the mobile phone. He is considered to be the inventor of the first modern portable handset.

1977 AT&T Bell created the prototype Cellular phone system.

1979 The 1st cellular operating system begins in Tokyo.

1980's Up until the 1980's, portable phones were mainly car phones, and were used more like a radio. When Dr Martin Cooper from Motorola designed the first mobile handset in the early 70's, it took nearly about 8 years before network companies started building networks which would become the backbone of the mobile network system use today.

1981 Nokia helped to establish the world's first international cellular mobile network. This was introduced in Scandinavia, with Nokia producing the first car phone for that network.

1982 It was in this year that America implemented the first Analogue cellular phone service. Also in this year European group nominated the Global Systems for Mobile (known today as GSM), by Nordic Telecom and Netherlands PTT. The GSM system has became the biggest digital system which is being used in the world today.

1983 It took another ten years after the prototype, before Motorola released the first commercial mobile cellular phone.

1989 Germany introduces the GSM system in their country.

1990's With mobile phones becoming cheaper because networks packaging the mobile phone with accounts on termed contracts and later on pre-paid bundled mobile phones, that the world saw the fast paced growth of mobiles Nokia mobile phones dominating the market.

1994 Motorola develop the first digital network and mobile phone that incorporated paging, data and voice calls.

1999 Mobile phones were now able to access the internet via GPRS, although it was a very basic and slow connect compared to computer internet standards. It was a lot faster than the old data communication on mobile phones.

2000's With JAVA software now on mobiles and cameras, the mobile phone has now become one of the must have gadgets in the world as we know it. People can take a photo and send it to a friend on the other side of the world. They can download games on their handset. The mobile phone has become more than just a telephone, it is now considered to be part of your lifestyle.

Nokia has established themselves as the biggest mobile phone manufacture in the world today, dominating the sales since the 90's. Nokia is leading the way with the must have mobile phones.

2003 In China alone 137 billion text messages were sent on mobile phones.

Statistics

Worldwide Sales of Mobile Terminals to End Users, 2002/2003
(Thousands of Units)

Note: This table includes sales of integrated digital enhanced network (iDEN) phones and wireless local loop phones. It excludes shipments from original design manufacturers to original equipment manufacturers. Source: Gartner Dataquest (March 2004)