Mobile in Past and Present

The first mobile telephone call was made on 17 June 1946 from a car in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, using the Bell System's Mobile Telephone Service. This was followed in 1956 by the world’s first partly automatic car phone system, Mobile System A (MTA) in Sweden. The MTA phones were composed of vacuum tubes and relays, and had a weight of 88.2 pounds (40 kg).

John F. Mitchell, Motorola's chief of portable communication products and Martin Cooper's boss in 1973, played a key role in advancing the development of handheld mobile telephone equipment. Mitchell successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use anywhere and participated in the design of the cellular phone. Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, was the key researcher on Mitchell's team that developed the first hand-held mobile telephone for use on a cellular network. Using a somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973 to his rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.

The new invention sold for $3,995 and weighed two pounds, leading to a nickname "the brick". The world's first commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979, initially in the metropolitan area of Tokyo. In 1981, this was followed by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Several countries then followed in the early-to-mid 1980s including the UK, Mexico and Canada.

On 6 March 1983, the DynaTAc mobile phone launched on the first US 1G network by Ameritech. It cost $100m to develop, and took over a decade to hit the market.The phone had a talk time of just half an hour and took ten hours to charge. Consumer demand was strong despite the battery life, weight, and low talk time, and waiting lists were in the thousands.

In 1991, the second generation (2G) cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard, which sparked competition in the sector as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators. Ten years later, in 2001, the third generation (3G) was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard. This was followed by 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancements based on the high-speed packet access (HSPA) family, allowing UMTS networks to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

By 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media.Consequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized 4th-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to 10-fold over existing 3G technologies. The first two commercially available technologies billed as 4G were the WiMAX standard (offered in the U.S. by Sprint) and the LTE standard, first offered in Scandinavia by TeliaSonera.

There are several reasons as to why the mobiles have gained such tremendous popularity amongst people worldwide. Imagine the days when there was no mobile and the world talked on landlines. If you have lived in those days you would surely also be aware about the problems that one had to face. Just imagine those cracked voices and wrong numbers and the helplessness of talking from near the phone.

Well, mobiles came in and everything changed and changed drastically. All of a sudden cracked voices, wrong numbers, the torture of talking from near the phone and the helplessness of not being able to talk while on move became a thing of past. Mobiles ensured that communication on phone became extremely smooth and a pleasure. Mobiles can easily be carried and as such talking while on move also became a possibility.

Then again it was not only the call making and receiving facility that mobile phones offered instead there was a whole range of benefits that can be reaped of a mobile. For the first time people saw a phone that was also a music player. Yes! It was now possible to listen to music on phone. Also was possible was to play games, calculate difficult sums, send and receive SMS, e-mails, video and still photographs and to download picture, video, favourite music and ring tones.

Mobiles come in various colours and sleekest designs and there is a huge variety to select from. It therefore should not come as a surprise to anyone about the mammoth fan following that the mobiles enjoy across the world.