Vintage Mobiles

1. First Prototype portable radio telephone that took the mobile out of the car and into the hand (1973)

Dr Martin Cooper (from the systems division of Motorola) is widely acknowledged as the person who took the mobile phone out of the car and into the hand. The proto-type was made in 1972, weighed nearly 1 kg and in a race to beat Bell Labs the proto-type is said to have taken 3 months to build.

Dr Martin Cooper poses with a proto-type mobile phone

Dr Cooper made the first call in New York City on a portable cell phone in April 1973 to Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Labs … a leading competitor in the R&D race and the first sign that fierce competition would by a huge driving force in mobile phone innovation.

Dr Martin Cooper’s first mobile call was to tease a competitor

It probably added very little in terms of technical advances as mobile radio was already well developed for military and emergency services use. Its huge contribution was to demonstrate the potential of cellular radio outside of the carphone.

It is not clear how many of these lab proto-types were every made or even exist today but hopefully a leading museum somewhere in the world will acquire one for posterity.

2. Motorola Dynatac 8000X – turning a vision into a practical mobile phone  (1983)

Motorola went on to commercialise the mobile portable telephone. The design team included Cooper and designer Rudy Krolopp.  What emerged was the  Motorola DynaTAC (an acronym standing for DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage).

In 1983 the FCC approved the phone for use by which time the weight had been brought down to just over 1 lb but still a hefty piece of equipment that came to be known in the media and the public as “the brick.  Inside were 30 circuit boards.

Motorola brought to market the first viable hand portable mobile phone, the Dynatac 8000X

It was launched with a price tag of $4000. Further refinements took place to the phone and imitators arrived in the market shortly afterwards including the Mobera Cityman. But the Motorola “brick” became the public perception of the mobile hand portable telephone – heavy, large, expensive and niche.

3. Technophone EXCELL PC105T – taking the mobile from the hand into the pocket (1986)

Technophone was a company set up in 1984 by Nils Martensson, a Swedish radio engineer who left Ericsson to set up on his own in 1978. Nils Martensson’s dream was to transform the large, clunky”brick” into the world’s first mobile phone to fit into the pocket. He secured a DTI R&D grant, brought as much computer technology into the mobile phone as the state of the art would allow (including soft keys) and the PC105T arrived on the market in 1986 with a price tag of £1990.

The Technophone PC105 turned the mobile from a hand portable to a pocket phone

The mobile phone actually did fit into a Marks & Spenser shirt top pocket, as the advertisements at the time illustrated in figure 6.

The first mobile phone to fit into a pocket…notwithstanding the antenna

The technical challenges were enormous and during the development phase Nils incentivise his development engineers to reduce the power drain with a cash bonus for every mille-amp of current reduction they managed to achieve.  Bit by bit the technical issues were resolved and the phone sold through Excell Communications as the Excell M1 and then the M2 (an example of the latter being in the Science Museum in London).

The Technophone PC105T was an extremely influential phone in the history of mobile radio for three reasons:

(i)                   Just as the Motorola brick had taken the mobile out of the car and into the hand so the Technophone PC105 directionally took the mobile phone out of the hand and into the pocket

(ii)                 It was the phone that inspired the DTI to see the future of the mobile phone as a mass consumer item and this shaped both GSM and led to the seminal DTI Phones on the Move that ushered in the conditions for the personal mobile phone. (See Inside a Mobile Revolution – The Political History of GSM Chapter 19)

(iii)                By 1991 Technophone was Europe’s second largest mobile phone manufacturer by handset volume after Nokia. In that year it was bought by Nokia… positioning Nokia as the Number 2 mobile supplier in the world after Motorola…and well positioned for greater things.

4. Motorola MicroTAC – some firsts in size and design (1989)

The Motorola MicroTAC analogue was the next leap forward in mobile phone design and was released by Motorola on Tuesday, April 25th, 1989. It was the smallest and lightest mobile phone and featured a flip-open mouthpiece (semi-clamshell), arguably the forerunner of the clam-shell in design concept..  It was immediately an object of desire for the wealthy customers and carried a corresponding price tag of $3000.

The Motorola MicroTAC that won the analogue mobile phone battle and lost for Motorola the digital mobile phone war

The deeper historic significance of the Motorola MicroTAC was that it’s sheer genius in terms of state of the art analogue technology led the top Motorola Executives to take their eye off the ball in terms of the GSM mobile phone revolution that was just around the corner. It led them to believe that GSM would be “carphones” (due to excessive current drain of the current state of digital chips at the time) and the world of the personal mobile phone would remain tied to analogue cellular networks until at least the mid-90’s. It was a huge strategic blunder.

5 Orbitel 901 – the first GSM mobile and the first to receive a commercial SMS text message (1992)

The first commercial SMS text message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in December 1992 by Neil Papworth of Sema Group from his office PC to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone… who received it on his Orbitel 901 mobile.

Orbitel 901 that received the first commercial SMS Text Message

The Orbitel Mobile has an0ther important claims to fame in GSM history. It was the first GSM mobile in the world to receive official type approval (May 1992). It is said that it beat the official type approval for the Motorola 1000 by about a week.

It was also the phone used by the University of Technology in Sydney for work they did to determine the limits of position fixing using a GSM network…the results being fed into the ETSI standardisation work in this area.

Orbitel was a joint venture between Racal (who then owned Vodafone) and Plessey with Mike Pinches (the first Technical Director of Vodafone) as its Managing Director. The company was eventually bought by Ericsson.

6. Nokia 1011 – Nokia’s first GSM hand portable (1992)

Nokia launched its first GSM mobile phone, the Nokia 1011, on 10.11.1992. The black handset featured a monochrome display and an extendable antenna. The memory could hold 99 phone numbers.

The Nokia 1011, Nokia’s first venture into the GSM market

The timing was perfect and the bet well placed. Like a surfer, with a mixture of skill (inspired intuitive user interface) and luck, they were lifted by the rising GSM tidal wave to global dominance.

The Motorola MicroTAC and Nokia 1011 need to be set side by side. Together they tell a tale of two company strategies around the choice of technical standards. Few would argue that the Motorola MicroTAC was not the better mobile phone both technically and in terms of style. But for Nokia the one design to the new GSM standard opened up a market in over 14 countries but for Motorola, each new analogue market necessitated a significant re-design since there were a huge variation in the frequency of operation and technical standard for the analogue cellular radio networks across the world.  As the design cycles of mobile phones got shorter and shorter in the 90’s Motorola found their competitive position  hobbled by the wrong choice of technology.

By 1997 GSM had up-ended the global mobile phone industrial landscape.  Motorola lost its crown to Nokia and was never given the space to re-claim it. From 1991-2000 Nokia’s number of employees doubled, net sales grew ten-fold and operating profit grew a hundred-fold.

7. Nokia 2100 – 1st phone with Nokia tune (1994)

There are a number of happy accidents of history in the mobile phone story in terms of successes that nobody foresaw. One of those happy accidents was the mobile ring tone bonanza. Without doubt its foundation was laid by Nokia with their introduction of the Nokia tune. So the story goes Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of Nokia Telephone Company and Lauri Kivinen listened through the Gran Vals, by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega and selected an excerpt “Measure 142”  to become “Nokia tune”.

The Nokia 2100 that brought with it the musical ring tone

It arrived on the market incorporated into the Nokia 2100 and from then on the “ring, ring….” was transformed into:

It was the first identifiable musical ring tone on a mobile phone and in this regard the Nokia 2100 was game-changing mobile phone for the industry and consumers.

8. Nokia 9000 Communicator – the first mobile to make a reality of the mobile office (1996)

In 1989 the DTI published its “Phones on the Move” document that set out a vision that one strand of future mobile phone design would be the incorporation of many new functions like electronic diaries and other Information Technology novelties and the term the “office in the pocket” was coined to express this vision.   In 1996 Nokia turned a vision of an “office in the pocket” into a practical reality with the introduction of their Nokia Communicator.

The Nokia Communicator ushers in the “Office in the Pocket”

The Nokia Communicator gathered around it a hardcore of devotees who organised their lives via their mobile phone. It is probably the point of origin of the mobile phone becoming a vortex sucking in ever more functions and applications as the basic mobile phone became commodity consumer items.

9. Siemens S10 – the first mobile phone with a full colour screen (1998)

The Siemens S10 was the first mobile phone with a colour screen but it was not the screen that was to change the world. The Siemens S10 emerged in 1998 with four only colours (red, green, blue and white) and with a screen resolution of only 5238 pixels (97×54).

Siemens S10 adds colour for the first time to the mobile screen

In December 1999 DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone operator in Japan, introduced the first mobile with a colour screen with the sort of quality that is more akin to the colour screens of today’s mobiles.

DoCoMo D502i dramatically steps up the quality of colour

The mobile was manufactured by Mitsubishi and had screen has a resolution of 96 x 120 and 256 colours. The popularity of coloured screen exploded around the world and only 2 years later annual sales of mobile phones with coloured screens had leapt to over 150 million units. The D502i itself never appeared outside of Japan as it only worked on the PDC network – a technology that was unique to Japan – one of the reasons why Japanese Companies, inspite of their fantastic mobile phone innovations, were held back from dominating the global mobile phone market.

10. Nokia 7110 – the first effort at taking the Internet onto a mobile (1999)

The Nokia 7110 was the first mobile phone to have a WAP Browser (Wireless Application Protocol) or Microbrowser.

The Nokia 7110 with WAP browser tries to take the Internet to the mobile phone

WAP was enormously hyped up by the Industry. I sat in a presentation by Nokia just prior to the 3G auctions in which Nokia showed a slide in which the Internet growth curve (which was on a sharp upwards trend) was superimposed upon the mobile growth curve ( which was also on a sharp upwards trend) and it projected a future without limit. Well the consumer found the WAP phone had definite limits compared with their wireline/PC experience and were disappointed.

11. Kyocera VP210 – the first mobile offering video  telephony (1999)

The first mobile phone to offer two way video telephony was the Kyocera VP210 in 1999. It operated on the Japanese PHS system which was a mobile network of the Telepoint type ie using essentially cordless phones over short links to wireless hot spots.

VP210 was the first mobile video phone

It is questionable to include this mobile as the purists would not count what is essentially a chordless phone as mobile phone in the common meaning of the term. The reason it appeared on this type of network first is that the standard data rate was 32 kb/s whereas GSM started its life with only 16 kb/s for voice (or 9.6 kb/s for pure data) and getting good quality pictures and voice over 16 kb/s was too much of a stretch. An interesting facet of this comparison is that the reason 32 kb/s was possible over PHS was that it had very short ranges whereas GSM had to operate over very large ranges…which led to much superior coverage…one of the reasons why PHS (and Telepoint) did not survive.

12. Nokia 8850 – Introducing style into the design of mobiles (1999)

In 1995 Frank Nuovo established a Nokia design unit to influence and steer the design of Nokia phones. Nuovo studied industrial design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and also spent time with studio Designworks before joining Nokia. The 8850 was his brainchild.  The Nokia 8850 was announced in 1999 and represented the arrival of style over pure technology advance that had hitherto largely driven the mobile phone market.

The Nokia 8850 built to catch the eye rather than price or performance

Frank Nuovo went on to head the Vertu project which is Nokia’s luxury phone division that has driven the mobile phone into the strata of astronomically priced “high fashion” items.

13. Motorola L7089 Timeport -Bridging the Atlantic for travelers (1999)

The bridging of the 900 , 1800 and 1900 MHz bands in the one mobile phone unified the GSM system between the USA and the rest of the GSM world and was hugely significant in the universality of the GSM service, particularly to the business world (you cannot be a global company and not travel to the USA). The final destination was arrived at with the Motorola L7089…

The Motorola Timeport tri-band phone unifies the GSM business world

but the journey is interesting. The first GSM mobile that allowed people to cross the Atlantic was actually the Bosch World 718 that was a dual 900 MHz/1900 MHz phone and

introduced in June 1998. (It was badged by a few other companies so we can eliminate them). This phone, in turn, was based on a GSM mobile that Dancall developed when it was owned by Amstrad. A prototype of the phone was shown at C-Bit in 1997. Meanwhile Amstrad sold out to Bosch and Bosch sold the phone as the Bosch 738 but this quickly transmuted into the Bosch world 718.

Now there may have been an earlier dual band phone but according to Dancall this

required the user to stop the call to switch bands. Dancall claim their phone to be the first dual band phone with seamless handover (using a new type of Phase Lock Loop synthesiser called fractional N PLL).

Then in parallel CommQuest Technologies emerged in Jan 1998 to announce their two chip tri-band solution (with the time-line making it unlikely that the Dancall development triggered their development). Motorola used this to produce the first tri-band phone in 1999 that was introduced into China as the L2000 (with Chinese characters and some adaptation to the key pad to allow the up-stroke important to the Chinese language) and the rest of the world as the L7089 Timeport.

So it is a matter for argument as to whether it was the Bosch World 718 or the Motorola L7089 was the phone changing the course of mobile phone history. Consistent with my criteria of being the first is not sufficient on its own. The sea-change actually resulted from the combination of the CommQuest 2 chip solution and Motorola industrialising it on a scale that made the tri-band feature affordable to all high end phones and the rest of the industry then quickly followed. The world phone became the normal business phone. It should therefore occupy the slot as the phone that changed the world in respect of the triband phone with Dancall in particular getting an honourable mention with the brilliance of working out that you could create a world phone just with the right combination within a dual band phone.

14. Samsung SPH-WP10 – The world’s first wrist watch mobile phone (1999)

The mobile phone built into a wrist watch was always an obvious end-destination for the continuously shrinking size of mobiles over the 1990’s. Samsung claim to be the first to bring one to market with their SPH-WP10.

Samsung SPH-WP10 – Turning advances in shrinking the size of mobile phones into a wrist watch mobile

One may have imagined there would have been a very big demand against a backdrop of a public fed on films of fictional detective Dick Tracy using his wrist watch radio phone. But it has remained a niche product up until now. Samsung followed up the SPH-WP10 almost a decade later with their 9110 (2009) and LG have a comparable product in their GD910 (2008). There are dozens of very moderately priced unbranded wrist watch mobile phones coming from a number of Chinese producers.

The more up-to-date twists on the wrist watch mobile phone has been a wrist watch display that is fed via a blue-tooth link to a smart phone carried nearby in the pocket. The recent Sony SmartWatch is a recent example of this new technical trend for mobile wrist watches. My research has yet to track down the first.

15. Ericsson R380 – The mobile that blazed the trail for the SmartPhone (2000)

Ericsson brought out the R380 in 2000. It incorporated the two key features of today’s SmartPhones: a touch screen and an open operating system.

The Ericsson R380 ground breaking development of the Smartphone

The OS was the EPOC operating system first pioneered by Psion for its digital personal assistant and thrown open to other vendors to use. It was to lead onto the Symbian OS. However the R380 architecture did not envisage users down-loading their own Apps at that time. So the R380 had more of the character of a feature phone – with its focus on the PDA applications.

The R380s operated on 900/1800 MHz. Another version, the R380, was brought out for the US market and operated on 800/1900 MHz.

It was the first mobile to be marketed as a “Smartphone”.

16. Ericsson T36 – the first mobile with blue-tooth (2000)

The Ericsson T36 was a prototype version of what later became the T39 and the very first phone with Bluetooth.

The Ericsson T36 brought the mobile phone into connection with things around it

With the arrival of Bluetooth the phone could be linked to independent devices in proximity of the phone. The two most widespread applications are to link to a hands free kit in the car and to link to a Bluetooth headset or ear-piece. Soon almost all medium to high end phones incorporated a Bluetooth capability.

17.Samsung SCH-N300 with Verizon – the first commercial A-GPS (2001)

For a development as important as mobile network Assisted GPS (A-GPS) it is very difficult to tie down exactly the first mobile featuring A-GPS as it required not only the mobile innovation but the network service to provided the “assisted” function. Verizon had such a service working with the Samsung SCH-N300 from December 2001 and that is the earliest record I have found so far.

Samsung SCH-N300 appears as the first A-GPS mobile with active commercial network assistance

Benefon brought their Esc! and Track mobiles to market also around December 2001 but the essential link to a capable mobile network is not clear.  As early as 1998 Enuvis, SnapTrack, Global Locate and Traxsis had various developments underway to meet the E911 mandate but no clear association with a particular commercially available mobile phone…and most interesting is that research so far has not thrown up anyone claiming to have produced the world’s first mobile phone with A-GPS…so for the present the Samsung SCH-N300 appears to have the best claim. I am interested to hear from anyone who can fill in the gaps in my research.

18. Siemens SL45 – the first mobile with MP3 player (2001)

In 2001 Siemens brought together for the first time the mobile phone and MP3 player in their SL45. However, it needed a 32MB plug-in card to store the music on.

Siemens SL45 pioneered MP3 music onto the mobile

In early 2002 Sprint offered the SPH-M100 from Samsung and brought together for the first time the mobile phone and MP3 player and integrated storage.

Samsung M100 brought the MP3 music player to the mobile phone

It was one of the early examples of the mobile phone sucking in features that up to then had been a distinct market in their own right. It had 64 MB of data storage that provided for around 1 hour play-time. It commanded an intial price of $400 for a mobile phone alone that would not have fetched more than $250 but soon MP3 become standard on all mid to high end mobile phones.

19.  Blackberry 957 Internet edition – the mobile that made a reality of push e-mail (2001)

Without a doubt the RIM Blackberry is one of the phones that has changed the course of mobile phone history. But which Blackberry or which history?

The earliest Blackberry model was the 850 (followed by the 857) and worked on a packet-switched network networks called DataTac, which in turn evolved from a network developed by Motorola for vertical mobile data applications, such as field force management. Both the Blackberry and the network it ran on were a niche sideshows and of no consequence to the wider mobile radio world.

More internationally significant was their  900 model that worked on the Mobitex network  Mobitex was developed by Ericsson and again aimed at the niche vertical mobile data applications market. This still does not qualify as a significant step forward.

Probably the model that came to revolutionise the mobile radio industry was the Blackberry Internet Edition 957. It ran on the Mobitex network in the US and was specifically designed for use with POP accounts.

The 957 was the first Blackberry designed for use with POP accounts

With the Internet Edition, the provider of the Internet service took responsibility for ensuring e-mails were delivered and an Exchange Server was no longer needed. A BB Redirector ensured that when a new email arrived in the user’s mail server a copy of the email was automatically sent to the user’s 957. Push e-mail linked to Internet arrived on a portable wireless device!

Some might argue that devices working on networks other than a public cellular radio network do not qualify to be a part of the mainstream mobile phone history. In which case the Blackberry 5810 takes the prize as the first GSM/GPRS voice enabled mobile. This version was designed only to work on the North American 1900 MHz networks. It was released in May 2002, measured 4.6 x 3.1 x 0.7 inches, weighed 4.7 oz, had 4 hours talk time and 10 days standby time.  In September 2002 the 5820, the version that worked on 900 Mhz/1800 MHz, arrived.

Another innovation with the Blackberry was the thumb-wheel used to scroll down the list of e-mails and an in important part of the Blackberry addiction but this has not swept into the wider mobile phone industry.

20. Sharp J-SH04 – first to discover the consumer love affair with the camera phone (2001)

The Sharp J-SH04 was the world’s first phone to incorporate a camera and this was followed a month later by the J-SH05 making it the first clamshell mobile with a camera.

The Sharp J-SH04 & 05 were the world’s first camera phones

It represents another happy accident in mobile phone history. The idea was developed by Sharp. So the story goes (told to me by an Executive of Vodafone kk) that Sharp uncharacteristically did little market research with their first-line customers (the Japanese mobile phone operators) before developing the phone. They first tried to interest the market leader DocoMo in distributing the phone but DoCoMo thought that nobody would want such a poor resolution camera. They then approached J-Phone, the struggling smallest of the three Japanese operators. The J-Phone engineers liked the novelty but the marketing department thought it a daft idea. Under pressure from the engineers the company ordered two versions of the phone with 8000 being a phone without the camera and 2000 with the camera. The result was to see the 2000 fly out of the doors and many years later the J-Phone warehouse (by then Vodafone KK) still had some of the remaining 8000 phones without the camera languishing unsold.

The phone was succeeded by the J-SH05 flip phone, which was released just one month later. The camera phone had arrived. The idea of the camera phone was embraced across the industry… with some quite remarkable news footage being captured by consumers with their now ubiquitous camera phones.

21. Sharp Mova SH251iS – The first 3-D screen on a mobile phone (2002)

On the 17^th December 2002 the Japanese mobile operator DoCoMo introduced the Mova SH251iS that featured Sharp’s transreflective TFT display able to generate 3-D pictures without the need for users to wear special glasses. The user was required to hold the phone directly in front of them and at around 1 foot away from them to see the images in 3-D on a 2.2 inch 65,536-color TFT display.

Sharp SH251iS brought the 3-D screen to the mobile phone

The mobile included a 3-D editor that allowed 2-D images to be converted into 3-D images. A user could send these 3-D generated images to other users with Sharp SH251iS mobiles. Since the probability of this was fairly low at the time of the launch of the mobile the DoCoMo service offering included down-loads of 3D animation (with plans to include videos later).

The display was developed in Sharp’s European Laboratory in Oxford. The phone was only ever released to the Japanese market as it was on their unique PDC mobile network standard.

The camera on the mobile was less impressive. It was not 3-D and its resolution was only VGA quality (310,000 pixles). The mobile could store 1000 still images or around 8 seconds of video (at a somewhat jerky 6 frames per second). Portrait shots could be edited to change facial expressions from happy to angry and lettering superimposed.

DoCoMo motivation to launch a mobile camera phone with a a 3-D display is likely to be linked to the success of their smaller rival Vodafone kk a year earlier with their Sha-Mail (picture messaging) service based on the world’s first camera phone.

22. Motorola Razr V3 (2004)

The Motorola Razr was the clamshell mobile phone with the thinnest profile on the market (13mm) in 2004 and made all the competitor phones around it look clumsy in comparison. For a few years it set a trend towards thinner mobile phones across the industry.

The thinness as a feature of high styling elegance was re-enforced by an all aluminum body with an external glass screen and keypad made out of a single metal wafer with an electroluminescent illuminated keypad.

The Motorola Razr V3 set the industry design standard for thinness and elegance

The mobile was developed in 2003 and introduced in the fourth quarter of 2004 as a high end fashion phone selling at $800.

23. Vertu Ascent – Turning the mobile phone into a luxury item for the super-rich (2004)

Vertu is Nokia’s luxury phone division. Vertu, more than any other enterprise, has propelled the mobile phone into the luxury goods stratosphere and has dominated this top of the market niche.

Vertu Ascent was the first mobile to sell on brand, quality of materials and outstanding craftsmanship

There are other companies that have aspired to occupy this space ranging from mobile phones studded with precious stones to quality mass market products such as the Motorola Aura but Vertu mobiles remain luxury market leader.

24. Motorola C113a (2005)

The GSMA (successor to the GSM MoU that became the mobile operators’ industry association) ran a competition for the first under $30 mobile phone as a stepping stone to a huge expansion of mobile radio in poor developing countries. At first the big suppliers were worried about a grey market developing but eventually a number of them entered the competition. The Motorola C113a was selected as the winner: It had a credible specification.

The Motorola C113a unlocked the mobile phone door to developing countries

The initiative was a success. When I visited Vodafone Egypt a few years later the local company was buying GSM phones for $20.

25. Nokia N92 – The dream of mobile TV (2005)

In South Korea mobile television made enormous headway driven by advances in the quality of screens. That extra detail made the pictures watchable on small screens. Both public terrestrial and satellite mobile TV services were launched. This is where to look for the pioneering mobiles designed for mobile TV. I am interested in anyone who can fill in the gaps with some insights of Korean mobile TV history .

Nokia went to enormous efforts to get mobile television off the ground in Europe based upon the DVB-H mobile television standard. Alcatel even had visions of mobile satellite television.  Nokia brought out the N92 as a flag ship mobile to stimulate consumer take-up of mobile TV. It incorporated a DVB-H chip.

Nokia N92 – Flagship mobile for Mobile TV

The n92 had a rolling 30 second capture of the video that allowed instant replays and a VCR function although this needed a plug in memory card since the mobile itself only had 40MB of integrated storage.

DVB-H networks were launched in Italy, Germany and Finland but lack of radio spectrum blocked DVB-H networks emerging in the UK, France and elsewhere.  This in turn depressed the scale economies and mobile TV never really took off in Europe. The space was left for a new generation of smartphones via the broadband mobile Internet.

26. Samsung B600 – The world’s first 10 MP camera (2006)

The first mobile phone produced a relatively low resolution picture and for the next few years most mobile phone cameras offered only a VGA quality.

Gradually the resolution crept up through 2MP in 2004 (Sharp 902) and 5MP later in 2004 (Samsung SCH-S250).

Perhaps the symbolic resolution that puts the mobile phone camera on a par with specialist digital cameras is 10 MP. That prize was secured by Samsung with their B600 in 2006. Why this mobile deserves special mention in the camera context is the prominent lens it has on the back of it.

Samsung B600 – the coming of age of the seriously high quality camera phone

The next  mile-stone was a 12 MP camera such as the Sony Ericsson Satio in 2009. Nokia swept in with an incredible 41 MP with their 808 Pureview introduced in 2012. Much of this additional resolution is used effectively as novel means of focussing the camera.

27. Apple i-phone (2007)

The Internet on the mobile phone was one of the huge flops of the dot.com era. The ideal looked compelling from a commercial standpoint of a massively growing Internet population and a massively growing mobile population – so pulling the two together seemed a guarantee of success – only WAP over GPRS on a tiny mobile screen was far from a compelling consumer experience. Thus Apple cannot be credited with bringing the Internet to the mobile phone – what they pulled off with stunning brilliance was to make it a compelling consumer experience. In part LCD screen technology had advanced to produce sharp detail, in part they had in place desirable applications, the Apple user interface was a critical success factor and into the mix went Apple’s marketing flair…it left the traditional industry in a follower role for high end phones.

The Apple i-phone made the Internet on the mobile phone a compelling experience

The first version was a GSM only phone released in 2007 with the 3G version arriving in 2008. It was a tribute to Apple’s marketing skill that customers for such a fantastic user interface to the Internet did not appear to mind the fact that they could only access the Internet at a paultry 56 kb/s…a limitation put right a year later with the 3G version.

28. Samsung SCH-B710 – First 3-D mobile phone Camera (2007)

A logical consequence of a 3-D screen on a mobile phone was a 3-D camera on a mobile phone. This arrived 5 years after the first 3-D screen in the form of the Samsung SCH-B710 in July 2007. The camera was 1.3MP with dual lens and the screen 2.2 inch parallax barrier 3-D display. The screen was rotated sideways for 16×9 aspect ratio TV viewing.

First 3-D camera on a mobile phone

The Samsung SCH-B710 was an absolute trail blazing mobile in terms of mobile TV quite apart from its contribution to 3-D photography. It  was capable of supporting up to 35 channels of S-DMB (satellite TV) and 18 channels of T-DMB (terrestrial TV), had picture-in-picture and video-on-demand.

The mobile was offered by the Korean mobile operator on its CDMA 2000 1X network for 600,000 WON (around $652). The very odd-ball combination of network standards (CDMA 2000, DMB-T and DMB-S) meant that this very innovative mobile was never seen or enjoyed by consumers outside of Korea.

29. The T-Mobile G1 Smartphone – Arrival of the Google Andoid Operating System (2008)

In November 2007 thirty-four companies formed the Open Handset Alliance with a pledge to unleash innovation for mobile users worldwide. Necessity was the mother of this polygamous marriage of rival mobile phone manufacturers in support of the Google Android development…all shocked by the release of the hugely successful Apple iPhone (2G) in June 2007.

The Android mobile software operating system moved quickly from incubation to the world stage.  In June 2008 T-Mobile announced the G1 and it was shipped in October 2008. The first mobiles were installed with the Android 1.0 that was quickly up-rated with the official Android 1.5 (Cupcake) that provided an onscreen keyboard (a bit redundant as the G1 had a slide out hardware keyboard) but more importantly it activated the built-in accelerometer to allow the screen orientation to change automatically when the phone was rotated.

The T-Mobile G1 manufacturered by HTC brought Android to market

The mobile was designed and manufacture by HTC for T-Mobile and had been trailed in the media as the HTC Dream as early as September 2007. In hardware performance terms the G1 was a match for the prevailing Apple i-Phone 3G. But the interface was not as intuitive as the Apple and there were only 34 applications in the Android apps stable. But the promise of Android had attracted a big following and the pre-order release was a sell-out.

It took time for the Android momentum to build up with HTC and T-Mobile having the distinction of the second Android smartphone (My Touch 3G) in July 2009. The Motorola Droid carried the first implementation of Android 2.0 (Eclair) in October 2009 and the HTC Nexus One the first implementation of Android 2.1  in January 2010. The Motorola Droid 2 carried the first implementation of Android 2.2 (Froyo). The Samsung Nexus S carried the first implementation of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) in December 2010. This was a remarkable software journey in a relatively short space of time paced by the fierce competition from Apple.

SUMMARY OF MOBILE INNOVATION TRENDS

Most people see the mobile history falling into two stages: Analogue and Digital. But it has been a much more interesting journey. Since the first GSM mobile got its official type approval in May 1992 there has been three distinct innovation phases.

The first was about shrinking the size of the mobile phone, its weight and battery life. The second was the “feature phone”. Products were differentiated by adding unrelated but very useful functions such as an MP3 player, FM radio, SatNav, better cameras and so on. Creative energy was also channelled into design and styling. The third phase has been the smartphone – where the phone functionality has been up-staged by a powerful mobile computing platform with a software Operating System able to host unlimited down-loads of useful software applications.

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