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Mobile phones are so much integrated into our daily lives that we sometimes forget there isn’t a very long history behind the invention of mobile phones. It is called also cell phone in some countries surely in England we say mobile phone, mobile number to terms related to our devices we use the prefix mobile, in the US movies you might see that most of the time the same device is called the cell phone.
Mobile phones were invented as portable devices that receive and make calls, as technology evolved the mobile phone device has become so much more than just a call-making device for humanity. Strangely, the latest news regarding advancements in operating systems and new devices coming out is always a discussion subject but we do not talk about the early history of mobile devices. Mobile phones were invented as the device that allowed call-making and receiving through radio frequency, at least that is how it was at the time, the working method was creating a link that establishes a connection to the switching systems of the operator that provides access to the public switched telephone network in short abbreviation PSTN. Modern mobile phones that are in every part of daily life use cellular network architecture; this can be also the reason why the device is called a cell phone. Apart from providing telephony services today’s digital mobile phones offer and support variety of services from banking, photography, multimedia messaging, email, and internet access to travelling.
The first mobile phone
The first mobile phone was invented by Martin Cooper of Motorola in New York City in April 1973, the first device was heavy around 2 kg, and the first regular network for cellular connection was announced in Japan in 1979. The first commercially available phone was provided for public access in 1983 model name was DynaTAC 8000x, and the mobile phone evolution reached the point that AI integration became available on our devices took only four decades. There are approximately 7 billion subscribers in the world to cellular network systems meaning that nearly there is one phone for every person which makes it the largest network in the world for people to connect.
In recent years the top mobile phone and smartphone developers are Apple, Samsung and Huawei. Smartphones are preferred by 78% of consumers when it comes to choosing between a smartphone or a mobile phone. In 2016 there was wider selection of brands and Nokia and Alcatel were considered as market leaders.
The early invention of mobile phones is connected to the predecessor analogy of communications from ships to trains, the race to create the real portable device started amongst engineering advanced countries after World War II. Early development of zeroth generation services were only able to support few simultaneous calls and were very expensive. It all started with the zeroth generation and today we are on fifth-generation connectivity of systems. Digital cellular technology was launched by the second generation which is called 2G in 1991, besides enabling the transmission of voice via digital signals, the 2G network pioneered mobile data services, initially with SMS text messaging and later expanding to include Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and mobile internet, boasting a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 384 kbit/s (48 kB/s).
Third generation
The third generation followed in 2001 which was first launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standards. Subsequent advancements included the introduction of 3.5G or 3G+ improvements utilizing the high-speed packet access (HSPA) technology, which empowered UMTS networks to offer increased data transfer speeds and capacity. With 3G, mobile broadband access of several Mbit/s became feasible for smartphones and mobile modems in laptops. This expanded capability facilitated applications such as mobile internet access, VoIP, video calls, sending large email messages, and watching videos, often in standard-definition quality.
In 2009 3G network was overwhelmed by the increased growth of bandwidth-intensive applications especially for streaming media in smartphones. The industry needed to optimise the data with 4th generation technology. The speed was improved up to 10 times faster than the existing technology of 3G. 4G technology was versatile in delivering high-speed connectivity for mobile broadband and the Internet of things which enabled better quality in multimedia streaming. The 5G technology commenced recently in 2019, 5G can be implemented in the low band, mid band or high band millimetre waves with download speeds that can achieve gigabit per second range, targeting a network latency of 1 ms. This is an outstanding speed and the closest to the near real-time responsiveness and improved data performance that is crucial for applications of games, augmented and virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, IoT and critical communication services.
Mobile phones in our era
In the developing world, the rate of people who use smartphones and tablets is only at the rate of 50% with Active Mobile-Broadband subscriptions. Today we have endless options with display, sound, CPU, Battery, software and operating systems in mobile phones we use and it seems that further developments will keep on allowing the changes to be adapted to our lives with high technology advances in mobile phone devices as they will get smarter.