1. 1. The First Commercial Mobile Phone
The world's first mobile phone call was made in 1973 by Motorola employee Martin Cooper
from the streets of New York City. He called his biggest rival. "I was calling Joel Engel who was
my antagonist, my counterpart at AT&T, which at the time was the biggest company in the
world. We were a little company in Chicago. They considered us to be a flea on an elephant,"
Cooper told BBC.
"I said 'Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cellphone, a real, handheld, portable cellphone.'
There was a silence at the other end. I suspect he was grinding his teeth."
The phone he called on was a prototype Motorola DynaTAC which, a decade later, was to
become the world's first commercially available mobile handset. It got the FCC's thumbs up in
1983 and launched in 1984 at a cost of $3,995 -- which is about $9,000 today, accounting for
inflation.
As a symbol for '80s yuppie tech, the DynaTAC appeared in Gordon Gekko's hands in Wall
Street, and later, Patrick Bateman used one in American Psycho. It was also known as the "Zack
Morris phone" because the Saved by the Bell character often used a similar model in the series.
The first mobile phone call in the UK took place in 1985. Comedian and one-half of Morecambe
and Wise, Ernie Wise, called from London to Vodafone's Newbury, Berkshire offices, then
located over a curry house.
2. The First Smartphone
The world's first smartphone debuted in 1993 at Florida's Wireless World Conference. Launched
by BellSouth Cellular and "weighing in at a little more than a pound," it was a phone-come-PDA
with an early LCD touchscreen display.
The press release from the launch describes the new handset: "Designed by IBM, Simon looks
and acts like a cellular phone but offers much more than voice communications. In fact, users
can employ Simon as a wireless machine, a
pager, an electronic mail device, a calendar, an appointment schedular, an address book, a
calculator and a pen-based sketchpad -- all at the suggested retail price of $899."
With only 2,000 Simons made, the handset is now a collector's item. The Microsoft-backed Bill
Buxton Collection of retro tech boasts a Simon, and you can find out more about the pioneering
device on the website.
3. The 160-Character Text Message Limit
2. There are various theories
about who invented the text message. Short, text-based messaging was developed in a range of
telecommunications systems toward the end of the 20th century, but the man credited with
creating the SMS -- the mobile phone's short message service -- is German Friedhelm
Hillebrand.
Working for the GSM group, Hillebrand came up with the concept of a 128-byte text message to
be sent via the existing mobile phone network. The message's shortness was an obvious
parameter due to the size limit, but the exact 160-character limitation was a curious creation of
Hillebrand's.
The story goes that in 1985 Hillebrand experimented with making notes on his typewriter to
come up with the ideal message length. "Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers,
punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always
clocked in under 160 characters," the L.A. Times reports.
He ultimately deemed the 160-character limit as "perfectly sufficient," and with two more
"convincing arguments" (postcards and Telex transmissions often had fewer than 150
characters), the GSM group created the standard in 1986. Afterwards, all mobile phone carriers
and mobile phones were ordered to support it.
Nowadays you can send messages longer than 160 characters, but Hillebrand's legacy lives on
via Twitter. The micro-blogging service's 140-character limit was determined by text messaging
-- 140 characters for the tweet and 20 for the Twitter username.
4. The Pocket Dialing Problem
Chances are you've received a "phantom" call on your mobile phone, especially if your name
begins with an "A." "Pocket (or 'butt') dialing," when a jostled phone calls a number from
someone's pocket or bag, is one of the minor annoyances of mobile life.
For the emergency services though, it's a more serious problem. In the early 2000s the <=""
p="">
<="" p=""> href="http://www.popcenter.org/problems/911_abuse/"
TARGET="_blank">National Emergency Number Association revealed that "phantom wireless
calls" made up about 70% of 911 calls in some U.S. areas. In the UK the figure reached as many
as 11,000 calls per day.
So why is a pocket dial so likely to reach 911 or 999? Although a phone's keypad may have been
"locked," these numbers will still dial in case of a real emergency. In fact, many older American
mobiles <="" p="">
3. <="" p=""> href="http://transition.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/unint911.pdf"
TARGET="_blank">auto-dialled 911 when a caller pressed and held number nine, or two
numbers at once.
Phone designers and manufacturers have now disabled such options, but pocket dialing still
happens. Last year two men were overheard during a car burglary after one of their phones called
911. In May of this year a drug dealer was arrested after he pocket-dialed the police during a
deal. And a Maine man with an arrest warrant was "triangulated" and caught when he repeatedly
called the police from his pocket.
5. The World's Most Expensive Mobile Phone
British jeweler Stuart Hughes lays claim to creating the world's most expensive mobile phone.
The iPhone 4 "Diamond Rose" edition boasts a price tag of £5 million, which currently translates
to $8,184,968.42.
For that astonishing sum, the purchaser gets 500 individual flawless diamonds totaling over 100
carats, a rose gold Apple logo with 53 diamonds, and a single cut 7.4-carat pink diamond on the
home button.
Hughes has also bundled in an 8 carat single cut flawless diamond which can replace the pink
one, just in case you needed a sweetener to seal the deal.
7. Telephonophobia, Nomophobia,
Frigensophobia & Ringxiety
Our relationship with our mobile phones hasn't always been an easy one. Aside from the
etiquette issues a portable phone involves, some sources suggest our mental health has suffered
too.
With varying degrees of plausibility, experts have identified telephonophobia, nomophobia,
frigensophobia and ringxiety (or fauxcellarm) as conditions that can affect the mobile phone
generation.
Telephonobia is the fear of making or recieving phone calls.
Nomophobia (no-mobile-phone phobia) is the fear of being out of contact either by your phone
being lost, out of juice or out of signal range.
"Ringxiety" or "fauxcellarm" is described as a "psycho-acoustic phenomenon" when you hear (or
feel) your mobile ringing when it's not.
Frigensophobia is the fear that using your mobile is damaging your brain.
