You will glance at your phone about 150 times today. Half a century ago, a mobile phone did exactly one thing, and that one thing was placing a call. The distance between those two facts tells the story of the fastest takeover of daily life any device has managed, and it starts with a stunt on a New York sidewalk. That stunt also explains why a gadget built for voice ended up running almost everything your hands touch.
Keep one idea in mind as you read. A smartphone isn’t a phone with extras. It’s a pocket computer that also makes calls. Once you see it that way, the sales records, the bacteria counts and the absurd prices stop looking like trivia and start looking like the footprint of a machine none of us ever really learned to put down. The phone earned that place by absorbing the job of the camera, the map, the clock and the console one at a time, and it never gave any of those jobs back.
What was the first mobile phone in history?
We are talking about a real mobile phone, not a car radiotelephone bolted to a dashboard. The answer carries an exact date: 3 April 1973. That day, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper walked out of his office in New York, stood on a public street and placed a call from a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC. He dialled Joel Engel, his rival at AT&T Bell Labs, and opened with a question built to sting: “Guess where I’m calling from?” The call was a corporate dare as much as a feat of engineering, and it worked.
What almost nobody remembers is the wait that followed. The prototype needed ten years to reach a shop window. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X went on sale in 1983, weighed close to a kilo and cost the equivalent of several thousand euros in today’s money. Placing a call was a luxury, not a habit.
The system that made it possible was documented in US patent 3,906,166, “Radio telephone system”, filed by Motorola in October 1973 with Cooper among the inventors. The idea was to divide a city into cells and reuse frequencies across them, so that many people could talk at the same time without drowning each other out.
The gap between that experiment and a phone in every pocket came down to engineering: smaller components, lower cost and wider coverage, none of which existed yet in 1973. The call proved the idea. The next decade proved the economics.
A brief history of the mobile phone
If you want the short version, this is it. Five dates carry the whole arc from a prototype in one engineer’s hand to the screen in yours.
- 1973. The first call. Martin Cooper and the DynaTAC prototype.
- 1983. The first mobile phone on sale to the public. The DynaTAC 8000X, at the price of a small car.
- 1992. The first SMS. Sent in the UK, it read “Merry Christmas”. The messaging we now treat as dead was born as a side channel of the system.
- 1994 to 1997. The first “smartphones”. The IBM Simon (1994) already joined a phone and a touchscreen organiser. The term smart phone was popularised by the Ericsson GS88 “Penelope” (1997).
- 2007. The pocket smartphone as we know it. The iPhone turned the phone into a screen you drive with your fingers.
Mobile network generations: from 1G to 5G
Mobile networks are sorted into generations, and each one changed what the phone was for. 1G was for talking. 2G added text. 3G put the internet in your pocket. 4G made it fast. 5G is built to connect machines, not only people.
| Generation | Years | What it added | Milestone |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1G | Late 1970s and 1980s | Analogue voice | First commercial networks: NTT (Japan, 1979), NMT (Nordics, 1981) and AMPS (US, 1983) |
| 2G | 1990s | Digital voice and SMS | First GSM network in Finland (1991) and first text message (1992) |
| 3G | 2000s | Mobile internet and video calls | First UMTS networks in 2001 |
| 4G | 2010s | Mobile broadband | First commercial LTE in 2009 and LTE-Advanced in 2010 |
| 5G | 2019 to today | Low latency and machine connectivity | First commercial networks in 2019 |
The standard that changed everything was GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), the European digital system that replaced a patchwork of incompatible national networks. GSM brought roaming, the SIM card and, almost as a side effect, the SMS, a channel for short messages that sneaked into the design and grew into a business of its own. The specifications that keep these networks running and growing are published by 3GPP, the partnership where 2G through 5G are written down.
Each generation stacked on top of the last instead of wiping it out, which is why a modern handset can fall back to an older network when coverage thins. You notice it as a bar that drops. The call rarely dies.
3G (UMTS) reached commercial networks in 2001 with the promise of video calls. Most people ended up using the internet instead, which nobody had sold them as the headline. 4G turned the phone into a broadband connection, and the first commercial LTE network went live in 2009 in Stockholm and Oslo. 5G, commercially deployed since 2019, goes further than faster downloads. It aims at very low latency and at connecting sensors, cars and factories, which is a different job from connecting people.
From phone to smartphone: IBM Simon, iPhone and Android
A smartphone is a phone that is also a pocket computer, with a touchscreen, an operating system and apps. The idea did not start with the iPhone. Engineers had been chasing it for more than a decade, and the first one to reach a shop counter arrived long before Apple’s keynote.
The first to be sold was the IBM Simon, on sale from 16 August 1994. It weighed half a kilo, cost 899 dollars and packed a phone, an organiser, a touchscreen and a stylus into one box. It moved around 50,000 units in six months and then vanished from the catalogue, but London’s Science Museum calls it the first smartphone to go on public sale.
Then came the pioneers most people have forgotten. The Nokia 9000 Communicator (1996) arrived with a full keyboard. The Ericsson GS88 “Penelope” (1997) was the first device to carry the words smart phone printed on it. The GS88 never shipped, and only about 200 were built, but it pointed the way to the Ericsson R380, the first phone commercially branded a “smartphone”, in 1999. That same year brought WAP, the first serious attempt to browse from a phone, and in 2000 the first phones with a built-in camera appeared.
Everything changed in 2007. Apple announced the iPhone on 9 January and shipped it on 29 June, with a multitouch screen, no physical keyboard and a real browser. Apple told the story itself in its launch press release, and the bar for the high end moved overnight.
The rival did not wait long. In November 2007 the Open Handset Alliance launched Android, and in September 2008 Google unveiled the first Android phone, the HTC Dream, sold as the T-Mobile G1. Since then iOS and Android have split almost the entire market, and the device that once only placed calls became a camera, a GPS, a music player and a console. If you want to know how those two systems took the ground, the history of operating systems tells it from the other side. Once a phone ran an operating system, software could hand it new jobs long after you carried it out of the shop, and the hardware stopped being the ceiling. That is the line between a finished product and a platform.
Smartphone facts and records
Twelve numbers and stories worth keeping. Some are records, some are warnings, and at least one is a reason to wipe your screen.
- The best-selling model in history is the Nokia 1100. Around 250 million units. Its reputation for being indestructible has not exactly hurt it.
- The first “smartphone” dates to 1997. The Ericsson GS88 “Penelope” was the first to carry the name smart phone, though the IBM Simon had already fused phone and PDA in 1994.
- It has killed off watches and alarm clocks. Around 60% of users no longer reach for these classics, because the phone replaced them. A wristwatch now sells as a fashion item rather than as a way to tell the time.
- Phone addiction is called nomophobia. It is the irrational fear of leaving home without your phone. It has cousins: “ringxiety”, the feeling that it is ringing when it is not, and “phubbing”, ignoring the person in front of you to look at the screen.
- We check our phones about 150 times a day. That is roughly once every six minutes. If you are holding it right now, no need to confirm.
- There are more phones than people in the world. Because plenty of people carry more than one device, mobile lines comfortably outnumber the planet’s inhabitants. Count connections rather than people and the human population loses.
- The most expensive phone in the world runs to about $95 million. The Falcon Supernova Pink Diamond, an iPhone wrapped in 18-carat gold with a pink diamond set into it. There was even a “budget” version at around $48 million.
- The screen carries more bacteria than a toilet chain. Between 20 and 30 times more, according to several studies. Reason enough to clean it now and then, and to leave it off the table while you eat.
- Bluetooth is named after a Viking king. Harald Blatand, “blue tooth”, ruled Denmark and Norway in the 10th century and was famous for uniting tribes. Hence the name, which is about uniting devices, and the logo, which combines the runes of his initials.
- In Finland, throwing phones is a sport. There has been a world championship since 2000. The record sits around 97 metres in the men’s category, so flinging a phone is no longer an accident. It is a budding Olympic discipline.
- There is a phone orbiting in space. A Google Nexus was launched in 2013 aboard a satellite to test its components in a vacuum, which makes it the most intrepid phone in history.
- “Airplane mode” comes from a real rule. For years mobiles were banned in flight for fear of interfering with aircraft systems. The rule survives on habit and caution, even though the technology now lets you connect.
Frequently asked questions
What was the first mobile phone?
The DynaTAC prototype with which Martin Cooper made his call on 3 April 1973. The first model you could actually buy was the DynaTAC 8000X, in 1983.
What was the first smartphone?
It depends on the criteria: the IBM Simon (1994) was the first to combine a phone with organiser functions, and the Ericsson GS88 (1997) the first to be called a smart phone. What popularised today’s format was the iPhone, in 2007.
What is the best-selling phone in history?
The Nokia 1100, with around 250 million units, ahead of other classics such as the Nokia 105 or the iPhone 6.
How many generations of mobile networks are there?
Five so far: 1G (analogue voice), 2G (digital and SMS), 3G (mobile internet), 4G (mobile broadband) and 5G (low latency and machine connectivity). 6G is still being standardised.
When was the first text message sent?
On 3 December 1992, when engineer Neil Papworth sent the words “Merry Christmas” from a computer to the phone of Vodafone director Richard Jarvis, in the UK.
Why is it called “Bluetooth”?
After the Viking king Harald Blatand, “blue tooth”, who unified Scandinavian tribes. The technology wanted the same for devices, for them to understand each other. The idea came from Jim Kardach, of Intel.
The bottom line
The smartphone is the technology that has normalised fastest. In fifty years we went from a one-kilo brick that could place a call to a device the size of your hand that does almost everything except, ironically, the one job it was born for.
Look at the arc again and the pattern is hard to miss. Every few years the phone swallowed one more task that used to need its own gadget, and the trade stayed the same each time. Convenience went up, attention came down.
And if you are interested in how we got here, take a look at the history of computing and the types of USB, the connector that has lived through this whole evolution from the other end of the cable.