Before the cellphone, Army mobile phones consisted of an FM radio backpack with a range of about three miles. They could weigh up to 38 pounds. Things improved with the Handy Talkie AM radio phone that weighed only five pounds, but its range was limited to one mile.
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Engineer Martin Cooper recreates his famous 1973 phone call using the world’s first portable cell phone. Built over three months by his team at Motorola, it boasted a full 20 minutes of battery life.
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It would be another 10 years before the first commercially available cellphone went on sale to the public. Until then, mobile phone users had to bring along a flexi-antenna and a battery pack weighing more than 20 pounds.
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The world’s first commercially available cellphone was the classic Brick Phone, launched in 1983. It cost $3,995 but could manage only 30 minutes of talk time. After five years, there were still only 340,213 cellphone subscribers in the U.S.
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The world’s first flip phone, the Motorola MicroTAC, arrived in 1989 and was a global sensation. It was light, just 12 ounces, and sported a state-of-the art dot-matrix red LED display. Cellphone sales boomed with 3,508,944 subscribers in the U.S. alone.
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By 1998, the Finnish company Nokia had become the world’s top cellphone manufacturer. It moved into the so-called smartphone market with devices like the Nokia 9210, which combined a phone with a computer operating system (OS). In 2002, 1 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. By 2006 that figure had doubled.
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Nokia’s 1110, which launched in 2005 costing $90, went on to sell 150 million units, and it’s not even Nokia’s bestselling model. That honor goes to the Nokia 1100, which has sold 250 million units around the world. It’s the bestselling cellphone ever.
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In 2007, the first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs at Macworld, ushering in the current era of smartphone touchscreen technology. The original iPhone sold 6.1 million units, and the iPhone remains the company’s biggest seller.
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There are now 6 billion cellphone subscribers in the world, which is 86 percent of the population. China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile phone operator, with 703 million subscribers. Its closest competitor is Vodafone, with 386 million customers. America’s largest network is Verizon Wireless, with 108 million subscribers.
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Smartphones accounted for more than half of all cellphone sales in 2012. And here comes the future—the so-called superphone. Taiwanese tech giant HTC is taking preorders for its HTC One, a five-ounce aluminum-cased Android smartphone.
