It’s difficult to imagine a time without cell phones connecting us to people across the city, country, and world.
Features we might take for granted, like being able to change our background, type with a full keyboard (plus emojis) and send unlimited messages were all developed and introduced over a rather long period of time.
A lot has changed since the cell-phone was invented. Here's what it has looked like over the years.
The first phone weighed over two pounds.
In 1973, the first call from a hand-held device was made with a phone shaped like a brick that weighed about 2.4 pounds. Martin Cooper, an executive at Motorola, picked up the large device — one that only worked for 30 minutes of chatting after a 10-hour charge — and called Dr. Joel Engel, an engineer at their rival company, Bell Labs, reported Wired.
Over the past half-century, the cell phone has become much smaller and easier to carry around, and it’s evolved to connect us in ways that Cooper and Engel perhaps never imagined.
In 1983, Motorola released a $4,000 phone.
It took about 10 years to make the phone Cooper used for the first call available to the commercial public. According to Wired, in 1983, Motorola released the DynaTAC which was still bulky and heavy and cost approximately $4,000 But it wasn’t until 1989 that phones began to shrink in size with the Motorola MicroTac, a flip phone small enough to fit inside a shirt pocket.
Nokia got involved in the 2000s.
At the turn of the century, Nokia burst onto the scene taking the cellphone market by storm. The Nokia 6000 series introduced phones with durable, rectangular shape that fit perfectly into a palm, purse, or pocket. It was the first cell phone made more affordable for the masses and it allowed them to browse the web, according to The Telegraph.
Around the same time, Samsung released the Samsung SPH-I300 which allowed its users to directly touch the screen of the phone to dial. Sound familiar? This phone easily resembles a distant relative of today’s touchscreen smartphone, according to PC Magazine.
The widely known Sidekick was released in 2002.
According to Complex, in Sept. 2001, the first official version of the Hiptop in La Jolla, California, was revealed about a month before Apple released the first iPod. The following year, T-Mobile released the Hiptop with a new name — the Sidekick. With a full keyboard that pulled out from behind the screen, the Sidekick was like a mini computer that people could carry around in their pockets. (Before this, messages had to be crafted with T-9).
"It was designed to be an extremely low-cost thing that you could use to carry information with you," said Joe Britt in 2004 during a presentation at Stanford. He was one of the co-founders of Danger, the group that designed the Sidekick.
A camera phone was released by Sprint in 2002.
This was the same year that the US adopted the camera phone, something that was released in Japan first. In November 2002, Sprint started the trend with the Sanyo SCP-5300, a phone that cost $400 and could only capture shots at 640 x 480 pixels, according to Digital Trends.
Although the camera phone was sought after when first released, other features took precedence and it wasn’t until after smartphones became popular that the camera, and quality of the camera, improved.
The RAZR was more than a cellphone.
By 2004, cell phone companies were competing in full force to make the phone not only function better but look better. The RAZR was released with its slim, sleek design and color screen, according to CNN. With the option to choose between silver, pink, blue, black[,] and a few others, it became a fashion statement as well as a means of communication.
2007 welcomed the first iPhone.
It wasn’t until the iPhone made its debut in 2007 that cellphones began transitioning from their role as a means for communication to a tool relied on daily for all sorts of tasks. According to History Cooperative, with the first iPhone, Apple introduced touchscreen functions, internet access through Safari, a virtual keyboard, and full rich-text email access.
Although at the time the iPhone was revolutionary, the BlackBerry eclipsed the new release, maintaining popularity. With BBM instant messaging, everyone from teens to businessmen and rappers were obsessed with the Blackberry.
Blackberry messaging was referenced in pop culture.
Jay-Z referenced the Blackberry in a song released at the time and more recently, in 2011, the internet uncovered a Lana Del Rey demo song including references to BBM, according to The Cut.
BBM messaging took normal conversations and placed them in the secrecy of the cellular network, turning thumbs into powerful tools of communication.
But 2007 and the release of the iPhone marked a big year. This was the year that Twitter introduced shorter messages and also the first time in history that Americans received and sent more texts than phone calls, according to Mashable.
Apple launched the App Store in 2008.
Just one year after the first iPhone release, Apple launched the App Store with 500 apps. Over 10 million applications were downloaded the first week, according to Read Write. Android followed a few months later with 50 apps in their store and Research In Motion released the BlackBerry App World just after that.
The iPhone 4 changed everything.
In 2010, the iPhone 4 made its debut. It was a slim, futuristic-looking phone with a battery life that could keep up with the demand of users everywhere. In just a year, they improved upon the iPhone 4, with the iPhone 4S adding the first personal assistant, Siri, according to iMore.
The same year, Samsung experimented with a larger size phone again, the Galaxy Note, with a stylus wedged into a small pocket on the edge of the phone. In 2015, Samsung tested the waters once more by wrapping the screen around the edge of the phone with the Edge series, according to Inquirer.net.
The iPhone 8 embodies the future.
Skip ahead to Apple’s iPhone 8, a phone made from the most durable and beautiful glass, designed for the kind of lives we live with our cell phones now, one where we carry them everywhere. It’s water resistant and has wireless charging features so that we never have to go without a phone.
Apple also released the iPhone X with the tag-line "Say hello to the future." One of its main features, face recognition, is being used to potentially push Apple Pay and the security around it.
Tech and phone companies continue to compete which means the cell phones they are creating continue to evolve. It’s hard to say what will be next, and it’s even more difficult to know how the changes will affect the way we communicate and, potentially even, the way we think.
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