A Brief History Of The Modern Smartphone
Today, smartphones are like an extension of
our body. They are not just used to make calls and send messages but to update
the world on social media, keep track of our movements and appointments,
provide our brains with extra memory, store our most important documents and
keep us up to date on world knowledge and news.
While we might not remember a world without
smartphones, they are in fact quite a recent invention. Let’s take a closer
look at a brief history of these now commonplace devices:
The first mobile phone
A patent for a wireless telephone was first
issued in Kentucky in 1908. However, this patent was more like a two-way radio
than the smartphones we know and use today.
The very first actual phone call made from
a mobile phone was done so by Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola
on the 3rd of April 1973. Cooper made a call to rival engineer Joel
Engel of AT&T from the streets of New York. The phone call, which was made using
a prototype of Motorla’s DynaTAC model, was immediately followed by a press
conference to confirm the achievement. The phone was only released to the
market ten years later, becoming the first handheld mobile phone available.
While you might think today’s phones are
expensive, the first mobile phones went on sale to the public for $4,000 each.
While mobile phones have changed
dramatically to that first phone call in the 70s, the first smartphone wasn’t
introduced until 1997. The Ericsson GS88
Penelope model has been created as being the world’s first smartphone.
A world obsessed
Today, there are more mobile phones in the
world than there are people. It is estimated that there are more than 5,000
billion mobile phone users in the world, with each user having an average of
1.5 phones. More people in the world also have access to a mobile phone than a
functional toilet.
The average person will check their mobile
phone 150 times a day, or every 6 minutes. In a year we spend around 800 hours
on our mobile phone, so if you check this
site it only takes a minute. This obsession with mobile phone usage
has led to an addiction identified as nomophobia.
Someone with nomophobia is afraid to leave
home without their mobile phone and will check their phone much more than 150
daily average. Around 200,000 million people are suspected to be suffering from
this disorder. Another disorder, known as ringxiety is attributed to someone
that consistently hears a phone ringing even when it is not, while phubbing
refers to a person who cannot focus on anything around them when busy with
their mobile phone.
Smartphones replace other gadgets
Over the years smartphone have diminished
the need for other gadgets. Alarm clocks, and even watches, have slowly
disappeared from daily life with around 60% of previous users no longer needing
these devices. Even relatively new devices, like the iPod, had a short shelf
life with smartphones quickly offering the same functionality to users.