Source 2: The Science of Smartphones by Kevin Jackson
The world before smartphones was cold and unforgiving. People waited in lines for
minutes on end without entertainment. Bar arguments ended in fisticuffs or someone
finally exclaiming “I guess we’ll never know!” Ignoring friends and relatives at the dinner
table required ingenuity and imagination. They truly were dark times. Jokes aside,
smartphones have irrevocably changed our lives. Mobile internet access allows
employees to work from anywhere, while countless apps help people file their taxes,
track their spending, or simply stay in touch with old friends.
But how did our pocket computers get their start?
1970s
Shrinking size, expanding powers: Ever since the first mobile phone class was
made 45 years ago, phones and computing have advanced hand-in-hand. Discounting
earlier technologies like the unreliable WWI wireless field telephone, the accepted
birthday for the cellular telephone is April 3, 1973. Standing near a 900 MHz base
station in midtown Manhattan, Motorola employee Martin Cooper dialed the number of
Bell Labs in New Jersey.
We don’t know exactly what he said on this call. We do know that Cooper used the
Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, a product that wouldn’t go on sale to the public for another
decade. But that call was the beginning of a mobile revolution. By 1979, Nippon
Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) introduced the first ever (analog) 1G phone service in
Tokyo.
1980s
The first mobile phone worthy of the name:The 1989 Motorola MicroTAC 9800x, with
a flip-up mouthpiece and retractable antenna, weighed less than one pound and was
designed to fit in a shirt pocket. Courtesy Redrum0486.
Although NTT gave Japanese consumers the first access to mobile phone service, it
was several years before the technology moved into the mainstream worldwide. On
October 13, 1983 Ameritech Mobile Communications became the first company to
launch a 1G phone network in the US, starting with Chicago. On March 13, 1984 the
Motorola DynaTAC 8000x of Cooper’s call finally went on sale—for $3,995.
The 8000x wasn’t very mobile—it weighed almost two pounds and took ten hours to
charge for thirty minutes of talk time. By April 25, 1989, the Motorola MicroTAC 9800x
showcased true mobility with its (relatively) compact size and flip-up mouthpiece. Of
course, they both still had antennae, and could only be used to place calls.
1990s
Simon says the future is calling. Introduced in 1994, IBM’s Simon was ahead of its
time, equipped with a touchscreen, calendar, address book and email capability—all
before most people had even heard of the World Wide Web. The first GSM phone, the
Nokia 1011, which went on sale November 9, 1992, also introduced text-messaging.
And here’s where we preview the smartphone. When IBM’s Simon was released on
August 16, 1994, it was a bit early to the game. You could send email (and faxes!),
sketch on its touchscreen with the included stylus, and consult the calendar, world time
clock, and address book. But you couldn’t surf the web—after all, NCSA’s Mosaic
browser had only appeared one year earlier and home computers were just starting to
adapt.
2000s
When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone at Macworld 2007, the world was more
than ready. If the smartphone was born in the nineties, then it came of age with the
millennium. NTT DoCoMo launched the first 3G network in Japan on October 1, 2001,
making videoconferencing and large email attachments possible.
But the true smartphone revolution didn’t start until Macworld 2007, when Steve Jobs
revealed the first iPhone. Previous phones relied on keypads and could only navigate a
watered-down version of the internet. The iPhone’s large touchscreen could flip through
websites just like a desktop computer, all while looking sleeker than anything
consumers had ever seen before.
2010s and beyond
So here we are in 2018, and worldwide use is expected to pass five billion by 2019. We
use our phones for so much more than calls: dating, job-hunting, reading books, and
watching movies.
The 5G networks predicted for 2020 promise even faster speeds and increased
bandwidth that experts think may enable life-changing technologies like real-time
telemedicine, virtual reality training, and truly smart cities.
With that kind of connectivity, a smartphone might become your next (and only) work
computer. Scientists are even experimenting with building a supercomputer out of
smartphones.
The smartphone’s journey may not be very long, but it’s definitely going places. Nobody
knows what the next Simon or iPhone will be, but we do know that whatever it is will be
incredible.