W3 Spin|Internet news blog

It’s hard to believe that society lived without cell phones but as early as 1956 there was an 88 pound MTA phone which was bolted into a car and considered a mobile phone.  However they were so large and power-hungry, they only existed in two Swedish cities and served only 125 subscribers from the year it began until 1967.

The first real mobile phone was more like a large square telephone receiver and not like cool small iPhones we see now, but they did their job and allowed people to walk around free from wires enabling them to speak to anyone who had a phone and anyone who was willing to pay the high cost of owning such a mobile phone – the first models ran around $3995 which would be approximately $8,677 now.

Next came the Motorola flip phone and the cell phone in a bag, also by Motorola.  Motorola and Nokia seemed to dominate the cell phone industry for several years during the late 80s and early 90s.  Smaller cell phones had large protruding antennas that needed to be deployed or the cell phone would not work.

iPhone application development was in the works in the late 90s and what was on the market was the first Blackberry which began in 1999 and was available for sale in 2002. These were the first cell phones to include integrated cell phone support.

Then came the cell phone with a camera inside and a color photo screen. It became a true cultural phenomenon in which everyone needed a cell phone with a camera inside it because one never knew when they needed to take a photograph of something and they didn’t want to be lugging around a camera plus a cell phone so why not combine the two?

Next was the razor cell phone which was a razor thin cell phone that was as light as a feather but lacked many of the capabilities of the bulkier cell phones such as the camera.  About this time the Apple Company began putting the word out for iPhone developers for hire.  In 2007 the Apple iPhone was unveiled as the best handheld computer device that happens to have a phone inside as well.