The mobile phone is one of our most commonly used devices. Today we can use it for everything. We can share photos, make video calls, play any kind of game. You can administer a whole company with your mobile phone, anywhere from the real wide world. But it’s been a long time since we arrived at this point. In this article, we will go through the journey and evolution of modern day smartphones and the milestones technology achieved along the way.
Bare Beginnings
The whole telephone technology was developed as early as 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T and further developed at the company in the 1960s. The long and varied history of radiotelephones dates back to World War II when the Army began using radio wave-based telephone connections. Handheld radiotelephones have been available since 1983. Because they are inexpensive to manufacture and easy to upgrade, cell phone networks have spread rapidly worldwide, pushing landlines into the background.
In 1945, the 0G generation of mobile phones, the mobile radio, was made. These phones are not officially classified as mobile phones because they did not support the automatic switching of the voice channel frequency during a call (call transfer), which may have been required when the user switched from one cell (base station) to another.
In 1970, Bell Labs engineer Amos Bell invented call transfer, which allowed the phone user to use multiple so-called also pass through a cell (district). Motorola engineer Martin Cooper is considered the inventor of the first practical mobile phone. Cooper initiated the first mobile call on April 3, 1973, with a modern, albeit somewhat heavy, portable device, to Motorola’s Communications Division director.
The first fully automated cellular networks were created in the first half of the 1980s (Generation 1G). The first was the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system, which was commissioned in 1981. By the end of the decade, most cell phones were too large to be carried in someone’s pocket, so they were usually built into vehicles as car phones.
The effect of Tech Bloom
New technology has spread slowly, with Motorola spending the next ten years bridging technological and bureaucratic hurdles. From 1983, anyone in the United States could buy a radio phone. The appearance of European mobile telephony had to wait until the fall of the Iron Curtain. The first radiotelephones were considered a luxury item. The first phone was weighty and significant (the size of a suitcase), and not everybody could afford them. Not only the phone but the call itself, from both parts.
The analog mobile network built by Westel had strange features. Like the radio, the quality of the phone calls was degraded by the weather, and the characteristic noise of the lightning strikes could be heard on the line. And if many calls were made on the network simultaneously, there could be interference that could cause you to eavesdrop on other mobile phones. The phenomenon disappeared with the transition to the GSM system, where calls could no longer be confused.
The most significant breakthrough came from the first pocket phone, the Benefon handset. The rectangular telephone, which looks more like a transceiver than a mobile phone today, required a large pocket but no longer had a shoulder strap. This has made the phone portable. At the time, most devices had a Bumford antenna, which eventually retreated during the transition to higher, megahertz bands. The antenna is now completely hidden in the housing.
A brighter future
The mobile phone has been a huge success, contributing to the change of the world. Mobile technology has been the fastest success in history: it took 128 years for a landline to reach a billion users. However, the mobile has achieved the same goal in 20 years. Besides, the most surprising and essential is how it has transformed over the past ten years.
The mobile phone was a luxury item where only business people would get it, and today it has become the everyday object that everyone can use, even to play games from an online casino. The mobile phone has become a necessary tool for stimulating economic development and the prosperity of developing countries.
According to a World Bank report, “the telephone was a rarity in the poorer parts of the world and is available everywhere today.” The mobile is not a toy in the hands of the poor but a hope for development. And then there was no talk of the development of mobile phones, especially the smartphone, which is connected to the internet network. Ray Kurzweil rightly said that “a youngster in Africa today gets more information with a smartphone than the United States President did 15 years ago.”
A World Bank survey finds that unpredictable developments have begun thanks to the mobile phone in a dozen countries. In Nigeria, mobile has allowed grain traders to find out the prices in different markets. Similarly in Uganda, educators used it to contact parents when their child was absent, reducing school absences. Milk production has increased due to simple SMS producers gathering information in Sri Lanka. In India, the Reuters news agency launched an SMS service in 2007 with helpful information. And finally, in Palestine, a telephone database has been set up for jobseekers.
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