Vintage Mobiles

The Orbitel Mobile’s most important claim to fame in GSM history it that it was the very first GSM mobile in the world to receive official type approval (May 1992). It is said that it beat the official type approval for the Motorola 1000 by about a week. There were four Orbitel mobiles type approved in the same month. The first was the Orbitel TPU 901. There was a version  using the same mobile stripped down for vehicle mounting called the Orbitel MPU 900. A third version was produced for Ericsson called the Hotline GM 120. The fourth version was produced for the German D1 network listed as mobiltelefon model 334.  This German version was one of the only two GSM mobiles offered at the launch of the D1 network.

When GSM was introduced it was more than just a new radio air-interface but a whole new mobile platform. The complexity was enormous for the time and the specification was still fluid. Not surprisingly the first GSM mobiles was either heavy trans-portable’s (handbag phones such as the Orbitel 901) or car phones (like the Nokia 6050). The first Class 4 GSM mobile (that we would recognise today as a hand portable phone) was the Motorola 3200.

Unsurprisingly it was an old analogue package…the brick…with a new digital innards. It got its official type approval on 3 September 1992. That was over two months after the Orbitel 901 and over a month ahead of the Nokia 1011. Whilst GSM brought many benefits in those first few years they actually took mobiles backwards in respect of their size, weight and power consumption compared with the analogue mobile phones of the same period.

Nokia launched its first GSM mobile phone, the Nokia 1011, on 10.11.1992. The black handset featured a monochrome display and an extendible antenna. The memory could hold 99 phone numbers.

The timing was perfect and the bet well placed. Like a surfer, with a mixture of skill (inspired intuitive user interface) and luck, they were lifted by the rising GSM tidal wave to global dominance.

The Motorola MicroTAC and Nokia 1011 need to be set side by side. Together they tell a tale of two company strategies around the choice of technical standards. Few would argue that the Motorola MicroTAC was not the better mobile phone both technically and in terms of style. But for Nokia the one design to the new GSM standard opened up a market in over 14 countries but for Motorola, each new analogue market necessitated a significant re-design. There were a huge variation in the frequency of operation and technical standard for the analogue cellular radio networks across the world. As the design cycles of mobile phones got shorter and shorter in the 90’s Motorola found their competitive position hobbled by the wrong choice of technology.

The world’s first commercial lithium-ion battery was introduced in 1991 by Sony in a camcorder product. By 1992 Sony were reported to be producing 100,000 batteries per month for cell phones in Japan. The lithium-ion battery offered a significant advance over the existing Ni-Cd and NiMH technologies including: higher power density, no memory and no requirement for scheduled cycling to prolong the battery’s life. The self-discharge of the battery was less than half compared to Ni-Cd and NiMH – contributing to improving the mobile phone standby time. But one of the big technical challenges has been safety. Sony had to recall a large number of these early batteries after the pack in a cellular phone released hot gases that led to burns to a man’s face.

It was widely believed in the mobile world of the 1980′s that only spectrum under 1000 MHz (1GHz) was suitable for mobile radio services…due to range limitations above 1 GHz. In Jan 1989 the UK DTI published their seminal consultation document “Phones on the Move” in which they proposed for the first time to licence new cellular radio networks (called Personal Communications Networks) at 1800 MHz. From this Mercury One2One and Orange emerged. Mercury One2One were first to open their service in 1993 but only covering the area within the M25. Mercury had a problem. Who would want a service only within the M25 when Vodafone and Cellnet offered a service across the whole of the UK? How did they attract consumers attention? I was told by a Mercury executive at their pre-launch dinner that their marketing consultants told them that the public only notice two words in Ads above all others…sex and free. Since sex was not appropriate they brainstormed how to work the word “free” into their proposition. They came up with their free calls in the evening and weekends. It resonated with the DTI vision of the mobile phone as a mass consumer market. It also caught the public imagination and created credibility for the mobiles being an effective alternative to the wireline telephone. The service was launched with two mobiles. The first was the Motorola m300:

The origin of the IBM Simon was a prototype personal communicator concept that IBM displayed at the 1992 Comdex Trade Show. It caught the attention of BellSouth Executives and led to a joint development that was announced in November 1993 at the Wireless World Conference. At the time it was hailed as the first time a company had placed a computer in a cellular phone, rather than placing a cellular phone in a computer. That said the development manager Rich Guidotti described it as a communications device first and a computer second. When used as a cellular phone, Simon offered standard cellular features, including a built in 9-1-1 emergency call button, last-number redial, last-10 numbers redial, address book auto-dial and roaming preference. When using Simon as a personal communicator, customers could access the device’s graphical user interface (GUI), which used icons and on-line help screens to make the device more user-friendly.

The phone worked on the analogue AMPS network. The e-mail could work through any Lotus cc:Mail post office that supported remote dial-in. Faxes could be created using a pen-touch screen or writing directly on the screen using a stylus. The LCD screen could display a complete QUERTY keyboard.

The Timex Datalink model 50 was the first watch able to receive down-loaded data from a computer. It was launched in 1994.

The data was transmitted from a PC (with Microsoft 95 or 97 Operating System) to the cathode ray tube (CRT) display as a series of pulsating black bars. These black and white visual images were received inside the watch via a tiny lens at the top edge of the watch face and translated by an optical to electrical transducer into binary data. The data was stored in an EEPROM memory. Later models included the Model 70, 150 and 150s that allowed more telephone numbers to be stored.

The first game on a mobile phone was provided by a German company called Hagenuk. It was a tile matching puzzle game called Tetris that had been released 10 years earlier and enjoyed by countless early PC enthusiasts on their Commodore 64′s.

Hagenuk had got in early into the GSM phone market. Their first GSM mobile, the MT-900, got it official type approval only 4 weeks after Nokia got type approval for their first GSM hand portable (the 1101) but Hagenuk beat Nokia by three years in getting a game onto a mobile phone. According to software engineer Christian Kraft he came up with the idea that the business people buying a mobile phone might also like a game on it. He implemented a version of Tetris in C code on the MT-900 over a weekend. A Hagenuk marketing manager loved the idea. After fixing a lot of bugs and copyright issues the game was implemented on the MT-2000. A small royalty on each phone was paid to the original Tetris inventors. Playing the game drained the huge battery in around an hour…not unlike today’s smartphones.

There are a number of happy accidents of history in the mobile phone story in terms of successes that nobody foresaw. One of those happy accidents was the mobile ring tone bonanza. Without doubt its foundation was laid by Nokia with their introduction of the Nokia tune. So the story goes Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of Nokia Telephone Company and Lauri Kivinen listened through the Gran Vals, by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega and selected an excerpt “Measure 142” to become “Nokia tune”.

It arrived on the market incorporated into the Nokia 2100 and from then on the “ring, ring….” was transformed into:

In 1989 the DTI published its “Phones on the Move” document that set out a vision that one strand of future mobile phone design would be the incorporation of many new functions like electronic diaries and other Information Technology novelties and the term the “office in the pocket” was coined to express this vision. In 1996 Nokia turned a vision of an “office in the pocket” into a practical reality on any GSM network with the introduction of their Nokia Communicator.

The Hagenuk (Toshiba) TCP-6000 was the first GSM mobile to come with integrated (internal) antenna. It was co-developed by Toshiba and Hagenuk Telecom GmbH, Germany, under a joint development agreement signed in April, 1994. The mobile was manufactured by Hagenuk at its Kiel facility in Germany.  The mobile came with built in guides of the functions to provide a manual-free operation from the start, and also allowing users to define their own personal menu structure – a feature we tend today to associate only with smart phones.

The outside (or extendible) antenna was much loved by radio engineers but not much loved by consumers. Motorola was one of the last to lose the outside antenna following a battle within the company between the engineering department, who were trying to squeeze out the best technical performance, and the marketing department, who were tapping into consumer preference.

The Siemens S10 was the first mobile phone with a colour screen but it was not the screen that was to change the world. The Siemens S10 emerged in 1998 with four only colours (red, green, blue and white) and with a screen resolution of only 5238 pixels (97×54).

In December 1999 DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone operator in Japan, introduced the first mobile with a colour screen with the sort of quality that is more akin to the colour screens of today’s mobiles.

The mobile was manufactured by Mitsubishi and had screen has a resolution of 96 x 120 (11,000 pixels) and 256 colours.

The next technology milestone for mobile screen quality was the J-Phone SH07 from Sharp – the first mobile phone in the world to have a 65k pixel resolution screen.

The popularity of coloured screen exploded around the world and only 2 years after the emergence of the D502i annual sales of mobile phones with coloured screens had leapt to over 150 million units. Neither the D502i nor the SH07 appeared outside of Japan as they only worked on the PDC network standard – a technology that was unique to Japan – one of the reasons why Japanese Companies, in spite of their fantastic mobile phone innovations, were held back from dominating the global mobile phone market.

The Nokia 7110 was the first mobile phone to have a WAP Browser (Wireless Application Protocol) or Microbrowser.

WAP was enormously hyped up by the Industry. I sat in a presentation by Nokia just prior to the 3G auctions in which Nokia showed a slide in which the Internet growth curve (which was on a sharp upwards trend) was superimposed upon the mobile growth curve ( which was also on a sharp upwards trend) and it projected a future without limit. Well the consumer found the WAP phone had definite limits compared with their wireline/PC experience and were disappointed.

The first wirelessly connected phone to offer two way video telephony was the Kyocera VP210 in 1999. It operated on the Japanese PHS system which was not a mobile network but wireless public access points to the fixed network using cordless phones over short links. 

The reason video appeared on this type of network first is that the standard data rate was 32 kb/s whereas GSM started its life with only 9.6 kb/s for pure data and getting good quality pictures over 9.6 kb/s was too much of a stretch. The reason 32 kb/s was possible over PHS was that the short wire cord of a telephone handset was replaced by a short distance wireless link. The cellular mobile phone, in contrast, is intended to provide unlimited geographic connectivity across an entire country. It is for this reason video phones  first appeared over the wireline networks with the ATT picture phone in the 1960’s. Providing higher data rates over the vastly extended ranges of a cellular mobile phone has been the great technology challenge of the cellular mobile age.

In 1995 Frank Nuovo established a Nokia design unit to influence and steer the designs of Nokia mobiles. Nuovo has studied industrial design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and also spent time with the studio Designworks before joining Nokia. The Nokia 8810 was announced in 1998 and represented the arrival of style alongside technology advance as a major influence on new mobiles introduced into the market. This was followed a year later by the Nokia 8850.

The bridging of the 900 , 1800 and 1900 MHz bands in the one mobile phone unified the GSM system between the USA and the rest of the GSM world and was hugely significant in the universality of the GSM service, particularly to the business world (you cannot be a global company and not travel to the USA). The final destination was arrived at with the Motorola L7089.

but the journey is interesting. The first GSM mobile that allowed people to cross the Atlantic was actually the Bosch World 718 that was a dual 900 MHz/1900 MHz phone and introduced in June 1998. (It was badged by a few other companies so we can eliminate them). This phone, in turn, was based on a GSM mobile that Dancall developed when it was owned by Amstrad. A prototype of the phone was shown at C-Bit in 1997. Meanwhile Amstrad sold out to Bosch and Bosch sold the phone as the Bosch 738 but this quickly transmuted into the Bosch world 718. 

The 32-bit RISC ARM7 was released in 1993. It was not suitable for the new generation of GSM digital mobile phones where code density and footprint were at a premium and memory restricted. ARM developed a 16-bit instruction set as a compact shorthand for the standard 32-bit instruction set. It was called THUMB. The space savings came from making some of the instruction operands implicit and limiting the number of possibilities. The THUMB code was typically 65% of the full ARM code and provided 160% of the performance. The ARM7 processor incorporating the THUMB 16-bit instruction set became their ARM7 TDMI. They licensed this design to Texas Instruments and it became their MAD2 microcontroller and DSP chip. The clock speed was 32.768 kHZ.

Ericsson brought out the R380 in 2000. It was the first time the word “smartphone” was ever used.  It had an  “open” operating system.

The OS was the EPOC operating system first pioneered by Psion for its digital personal assistant and thrown open to other vendors to use. It was to lead onto the Symbian OS. However the R380 architecture did not envisage users down-loading their own Apps at that time. So the R380 had more of the character of a software created feature phone – with its focus on the PDA applications. 

The R380s operated on 900/1800 MHz. Another version, the R380, was brought out for the US market and operated on 800/1900 MHz.

The Ericsson T36 was a prototype version of what later became the T39 and the very first phone with Bluetooth.

With the arrival of Bluetooth the phone could be linked to independent devices in proximity of the phone. The two most widespread applications are to link to a hands free kit in the car and to link to a Bluetooth headset or ear-piece. Soon almost all medium to high end phones incorporated a Bluetooth capability.

In Sept 2000 Samsung launched the SPH-M100 that brought together for the first time the mobile phone and MP3 player and integrated storage.

It was one of the early examples of the mobile phone sucking in features that up to then had been a distinct market in their own right. It had 64 MB of data storage that provided for around 1 hour play-time. It commanded an initial price of $400 for a mobile phone alone that would not have fetched more than $250 but soon MP3 become standard on all mid to high end mobile phones.

For a development as important as mobile network Assisted GPS (A-GPS) it is very difficult to tie down exactly the first mobile featuring A-GPS as it required not only the mobile innovation but the network service to provided the “assisted” function. Verizon had such a service working with the Samsung SCH-N300 from December 2001 and that is the earliest record I have found so far.

Benefon brought their Esc! and Track mobiles to market also around December 2001 but the essential link to a capable mobile network is not clear. As early as 1998 Enuvis, SnapTrack, Global Locate and Traxsis had various developments underway to meet the E911 mandate but no clear association with a particular commercially available mobile phone…and most interesting is that research so far has not thrown up anyone claiming to have produced the world’s first mobile phone with A-GPS…so for the present the Samsung SCH-N300 appears to have the best claim. I am interested to hear from anyone who can fill in the gaps in my research.

Without a doubt the RIM Blackberry is one of the phones that has changed the course of mobile phone history. But which Blackberry or which history?

The earliest Blackberry model was the 850 (followed by the 857) and worked on a packet-switched network networks called DataTac, which in turn evolved from a network developed by Motorola for vertical mobile data applications, such as field force management. Both the Blackberry and the network it ran on were a niche sideshows and of no consequence to the wider mobile radio world.

More internationally significant was their 900 model that worked on the Mobitex network. Mobitex was developed by Ericsson and again aimed at the niche vertical mobile data applications market.

Probably the model that can be said to have revolutionised the mobile radio industry was the Blackberry Internet Edition 957. It ran on the Mobitex network in the US and was specifically designed for use with POP accounts.

With the Internet Edition, the provider of the Internet service took responsibility for ensuring e-mails were delivered and an Exchange Server was no longer needed. A BB Redirector ensured that when a new email arrived in the user’s mail server a copy of the email was automatically sent to the user’s 957. Push e-mail linked to Internet arrived on a portable wireless device!

The Sharp J-SH04 was the world’s first cellular mobile phone to fully integrate a camera with the mobile’s telephone function, allowing the resulting picture to be sent over the mobile network. This allowed a consumer to share what they were seeing with a friend (you see what I see). This picture messaging was termed Sha-Mail based on the Japanese word for a photograph – Shashin.

The reason for the popularity of the Sharp J-SH04 and J-SH05, in spite of the poor picture resolution, was the innovation of integrating it with mobile’s messaging (sha mail) together with a user interface that made visual shared experiences with friends and family some distance away exceptionally easy.  

Claims have been made for the Samsung SCH-V200 as the world’s first integrated camera phone (June 2000 versus November 2000) but it was only half-integrated. The camera had no relationship with the mobile telephone other than sharing the same housing and battery.  The “tele” in telephone requires that information generated at one end can be reproduced at the far end of a network.  The Samsung SCH-V200 could not do this. The pictures had to be extracted by wire to a local PC. It was therefore not a “camera phone” in the modern accepted use of the term. The “phone” element was missing in the camera phone functionality.

The mobile included a 3-D editor that allowed 2-D images to be converted into 3-D images. A user could send these 3-D generated images to other users with Sharp SH251iS mobiles. Since the probability of this was fairly low at the time of the launch of the mobile the DoCoMo service offering included down-loads of 3D animation (with plans to include videos later).

The display was developed in Sharp’s European Laboratory in Oxford. The phone was only ever released to the Japanese market as it was on their unique PDC mobile network standard.

The camera on the mobile was less impressive. It was not 3-D and its resolution was only VGA quality (310,000 pixels). The mobile could store 1000 still images or around 8 seconds of video (at a somewhat jerky 6 frames per second). Portrait shots could be edited to change facial expressions from happy to angry and lettering superimposed.

The Sony Ericsson Z1010 is a notable technical milestone in camera phone history. It was the first with a front facing camera for video calls and “selfie’s”. Other than that, the Z1010 was an unexceptional GSM/UMTS clamshell mobile.

Some claim that the Motorola A920 was the first mobile with a front facing camera. The Z1010 was announced by Sony Ericsson in February 2003 and used extensively in multiple 3G operator trials that year. The A920 was not announced by Motorola until August 2003 and was an exclusive development with the UK mobile operator Three.

The Motorola Razr was the clamshell mobile phone with the thinnest profile on the market (13.9mm) in 2004 and made all the competitor phones around it look clumsy in comparison. For a few years it set a trend towards thinner mobile phones across the industry.

In 2003 engineers in Motorola’s concept-phone unit had mocked up an impossibly thin phone – at 10mm. This stimulated Rob Shaddock, a senior wireless executive, to set-up the “thin clam” project of developing the thinnest phone in the world. The task of leading the project went to Roger Jellicoe. It was organised as a “skunkworks” and the team of 20 engineers worked in secrecy in Illinois 50 miles away from Motorola’s main facility in Chicago. The external design of the phone was led by industrial designer Chris Arnholt who embraced a concept of “rich minimalism.”  The thinness as a feature of high styling elegance was re-enforced by an all aluminum body with an external glass screen and keypad made out of a single metal wafer with an electroluminescent illuminated keypad. Two key innovations allowed the team to make quantum leaps in thinness. The first was placing the antenna in the mouthpiece of the phone instead of at the top.  The second was placing the battery next to the circuit board rather than beneath it. Whilst the brief was a thickness of 10mm, successive pro-type iterations led the team to settle on 13.9mm. It was still thin enough to wow consumers. The mobile was  introduced in the fourth quarter of 2004 as a high end fashion phone selling at $800. It became Motorola’s best selling mobile of all time. 

Vertu was Nokia’s luxury phone division. Vertu, more than any other enterprise, has propelled the mobile phone into the luxury goods stratosphere and has dominated this top of the market niche.

There are other companies that have aspired to occupy this space ranging from mobile phones studded with precious stones to quality mass market products such as the Motorola Aura but Vertu mobiles remain luxury market leader. The average selling price of their phones is around £5000 and the most expensive exceeded £200,000. By 2015 they had sold 450,000 phones world-wide. Nokia sold it majority stake in the company in 2012.

Speech recognition has its own history. It appeared on the wire-line telephone network (as a network service) well before its first appearance on a mobile phone.

The challenge of getting voice recognition on the mobile phone itself was to produce effective software with a small enough footprint to make it practical for the prevailing mobile phone storage and processor limitations. That come together for the first time in 2004. The software was developed by VoiceSignal Technologies, Inc (an $8.5m US start up by Lazay and Roth that was bought by Naunce in 2007 for $293m). The mobile phone hardware came from Samsung. The mobile phone was the Samsung MM-A700 and was launched on the Sprint network in late 2004.

Apple (and most of the rest of the world) believes Apple were the first company to introduce the feature whereby a smartphone is unlocked by the user swiping their finger across the touch sensitive screen. Early adopters loved the feature and the rest of the industry rushed to emulate this “cool gesture” on their smartphones. However, in the very un-cool setting of a High Court in London a learned judge ruled that a small Swedish company Nionode had got their first. The mobile was the credit card sized Nionode N1 launched in 2004.

Their technology used a web of light beams. When the mobile was locked a padlock was displayed with an arrow to indicate which way to swipe (an earlier version actually had the words “right sweep to unlock”). The judge ruled that the Apple patent was “an obvious development” given the prior existence of the Nionode N1. So we owe thanks to the patent lawyers for mining this gem of mobile phone innovation history.

The GSMA (successor to the GSM MoU that became the mobile operators’ industry association) ran a competition for the first under $30 mobile phone as a stepping stone to a huge expansion of mobile radio in poor developing countries. At first the big suppliers were worried about a grey market developing but eventually a number of them entered the competition. The Motorola C113a was selected as the winner: It had a credible specification.

The initiative was a success. When I visited Vodafone Egypt a few years later the local company was buying GSM phones for $20.

In South Korea mobile television made enormous headway driven by advances in the quality of screens. That extra detail made the pictures watchable on small screens. Both public terrestrial and satellite mobile TV services were launched. This is where to look for the pioneering mobiles designed for mobile TV.  It is an important gap that still needs to be filled in this account of the evolution of mobiles.

Nokia went to enormous efforts to get mobile television off the ground in Europe based upon the DVB-H mobile television standard. Alcatel even had visions of mobile satellite television.  Nokia brought out the N92 as a flag ship mobile to stimulate consumer take-up of mobile TV. It incorporated a DVB-H chip.

The Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) display is an important stepping stone in display technology to give the consumer pleasure in viewing still images and video on a mobile phone. The OLED display technology also offers lower battery consumption. The first company to announce a mobile phone with OLED display was BenQ in January 2006.

The mobile had a 2 inch screen and 256k colours. Not far behind was the Nokia 6215i that came in September 2006 produced for the Verizon network. Display technology is continuously advancing. Samsung is one of the leading OLED display manufacturers and their research aims to double the efficiency, the lifetime and reduce the power consumption. Their Super AMOLED display has a 0.001mm layer on the surface that provides the touch-sensor (on-cell) over the display which incidentally improves viewing in bright light. The Samsung S8500 Wave, which was introduced in 2010 was the first mobile with a Super AMOLED display:

The LG Prada was a strong effort by LG as it not only carried the Prada co-branding but came with a ground breaking capacitive touch screen. Four icons at the bottom of the screen allowed the user to make a telephone call, send a message or go to the main menu. But there were physical buttons below the screen for send and return. There were also buttons at the side for volume control, camera and MP3 player.

The LG Prada was announced in January 2007 and brought to market in May. So it arrived ahead of the Apple iPhone whose launch was on June 29th 2007. But Apple proved to have both the stronger brand and superior exploitation of the capacitive touch screen potential. Who said so? The first Apple iPhone sold 6.1m units over the first 15 months whereas the LG Prada sold only 1 million units over its first 18 months.  

The Internet on the mobile phone was one of the huge flops of the dot.com era. The ideal looked compelling from a commercial standpoint of a massively growing Internet population and a massively growing mobile population – so pulling the two together seemed a guarantee of success – only WAP over GPRS on a tiny mobile screen was far from a compelling consumer experience. Thus Apple cannot be credited with bringing the Internet to the mobile phone – what they pulled off with stunning brilliance was to make it a compelling consumer experience. In part LCD screen technology had advanced to produce sharp detail, in part they had in place desirable applications, the Apple user interface was a critical success factor and into the mix went Apple’s marketing flair…it left the traditional industry in a follower role for high end phones.

A logical consequence of a 3-D screen on a mobile phone was a 3-D camera on a mobile phone. This arrived 5 years after the first 3-D screen in the form of the Samsung SCH-B710 in July 2007. The camera was 1.3MP with dual lens and the screen 2.2 inch parallax barrier 3-D display. The screen was rotated sideways for 16×9 aspect ratio TV viewing.

The Samsung SCH-B710 was an absolute trail blazing mobile in terms of mobile TV quite apart from its contribution to 3-D photography. It was capable of supporting up to 35 channels of S-DMB (satellite TV) and 18 channels of T-DMB (terrestrial TV), had picture-in-picture and video-on-demand.

The mobile was offered by the Korean mobile operator on its CDMA 2000 1X network for 600,000 WON (around $652). The very odd-ball combination of network standards (CDMA 2000, DMB-T and DMB-S) meant that this very innovative mobile was never seen or enjoyed by consumers outside of Korea.

In November 2007 thirty-four companies formed the Open Handset Alliance with a pledge to unleash innovation for mobile users worldwide. Necessity was the mother of this polygamous marriage of rival mobile phone manufacturers in support of the Google Android development…all shocked by the release of the hugely successful Apple iPhone (2G) in June 2007.

The Android mobile software operating system moved quickly from incubation to the world stage. In June 2008 T-Mobile announced the G1 and it was shipped in October 2008. The first mobiles were installed with the Android 1.0 that was quickly up-rated with the official Android 1.5 (Cupcake) that provided an onscreen keyboard (a bit redundant as the G1 had a slide out hardware keyboard) but more importantly it activated the built-in accelerometer to allow the screen orientation to change automatically when the phone was rotated.

Every 10 years or so mobile technology has made a generation leap…1G…2G…3G. The next step along this global standards path is the Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. The term LTE was chosen by the standards body as shortly after the 3G standard was introduced, the marketing departments of a number of small companies having proprietary technologies were using the term 4G to try (in vain) to grab the attention of the market. That said we are seeing the term 4G coming back into vogue as an alternative title for the LTE technology. The first LTE mobile introduced into services was the Samsung SCH-r900 on the MetroPCS network it the USA.

This has been followed by a number of LTE mobile phones in 2011 including the HTC Vivid, HTC Thunderbold and Samsung Galaxy SII Skyrocket. A modification of the latter, the Samsung Galaxy SII LTE, was the first LTE mobile in Europe on Swedish TeliaSonera network in 2012.

One of the serious disadvantages of watching videos on a mobile phone is that even the mobile phones with the largest screens still only offer a screen 20 times smaller than that found on a typical TV. It delivers a less immersive experience even taking into account that the phone screen is held nearer to the eye. In the world of television watching the size of a “typical screen” itself is increasing in leaps and bounds. Some consumers have a TV with a 50 inch screen hanging on their walls. This takes the game well outside of anything a mobile phone can ever be or do…or does it? This is where Sumsung have been very innovative. They have built in a projector into a high-end Android smartphone.

The race has been on since 2001 to improve the picture quality mobile of a camera phone. The Nokia 808 has notched-up the next milestone. Whilst the 41 MP has grabbed the headlines…the real story is the advanced processing of the pixels. The two ways these extra pixels are intended to be used are (i) is to provide an electronic equivalent to a zoom lens (roughly X2.8) or (ii) to reduce noise (by a factor of 7:1 in the 5MP mode).

The Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster released radiation into the atmosphere and affected a large area around the power plant. There was significant public unease that the government was not giving timely information on the safety risks. A demand arose for devices whereby the public could measure radiation levels for themselves. Soon monitoring devices appeared that could be plugged into the USB socket of a smartphone. The smartphone processed and displayed the measurements. Sharp produced the first mobile phone with the radiation monitor entirely integrated into it and functioning at the touch of a button.

Apple scored a notably technology first in September 2013 when they added their 64-bit “A7” system-on-chip (SoC) to their iPhone 5s. Apples rivals were caught out as their 32-bit processors still had plenty of headroom for the current generation of Apps.

The appearance of a 64-bit chip in a smartphone is not surprising as the smartphone is first and foremost a computing device and emulating the road map of the PC is a natural development path. The main advantage of a 64-bit chip is that it can move twice as many bits with each cycle of the processor’s clock. This allows it to perform computationally intensive tasks more quickly. Looking at it from another angle a 64-bit chip can more easily support larger amounts of random-access memory (RAM) associated with managing large data sets or handling memory intensive graphics.

The HTC One M8 is the first smartphone to have two cameras on its rear side. One is used for regular 4 MP image-capturing and processing the parallax differences with the other 2.1 MP camera. This allows data to be recorded on what objects are near and far.

The mobile has a software app that uses this depth perception data to allow the user to play with the focus after the fact. The user can pick a single point of focus and have everything behind it blurred out or zooming off into the distance.

How good a mobile broadband connection is usually measured by its down-load speed. LTE (more popularly known as 4G) has pushed the down-load speed boundaries by aggregating the data throughput across multiple carriers. When the bandwidth a mobile operator has in a particular band hits the limit the next stage of the evolution is to aggregate the data across multiple bands. This is the technology breakthrough created by the standards body 3G-PP and implemented for the first time by SK Telecom in S Korea. The first smartphone that SK Telecom is launching this new capability on is the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 S-LTE

SK Telecom is achieving 300 Mb/s by aggregating its spectrum at 800 MHz (10 MHz) , 1.8 GHz (10 MHz) and 2.1 GHz (20 MHz). The Samsung mobile’s model number is SM-N916.

The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium was the first production smartphone with a 4k display. It uses back-lit LCD technology with its 3840 by 2160 pixels spread across a 5.5-inch screen to achieve 806 pixels per square inch.

Getting the best perception of picture quality is not down to the display technology alone. Processing in the Z5 premium separates every colour, analysis it and optimises the result to avoid over-saturated colours. Between the LCD and backlight is a contrast filter that traps more light in and improves the black areas of a picture. What is particularly clever in the implementation is that the display defaults to 1080p whenever videos or photos are not involved in order to save battery power.

Royole Corporation, a specialist Chinese manufacturer of fully flexible OLED displays, released the first commercially available foldable smartphone in November 2018 with a single 7.8-inch display that folded outwards.

The phone becomes an Android tablet screen when it is open and two Android phone screens when it is closed. In the closed mode it detects which side of the phone is being viewed and switches off the side of the display not being viewed. The Royole Flexpai was priced at 8999 yuan (~£1000). The smartphone had a number of teething problems as a result of the rush to be first to market with the foldable screen  In September 2020 Royale announced the release of the Pai 2 that addresses the criticisms of their first foldable screen smartphone.

The South Korean Government, in partnership with their three mobile operators SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus together with Samsung, one of the top global smartphone manufacturers, set themselves the objective of making South Korea the world’s first 5G country. The planned “Korea 5G day” was scheduled for the 4^th April 2019. Samsung fulfilled their role with the announcement of the Galaxy S10 5G at the Mobile World Congress in February 2019.

However, they were not the only runner in the race. Hans Vestberg, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive officer, set a company goal for Verizon US customers to be the first in the world “to have the power of 5G in their hands”. They planned to launch 5G in two cities and gave a public launch date of 11^th April. But in private they were really planning to launch on the 3^rd April to sneak ahead of the S Korean launch and win the prize. They were working with Lenovo’s Motorola, who had produced a 5G modem that attached to their Moto Z3 smartphone.

Verizon thought they had it in the bag, but the Koreans got wind of their plan at the last moment. The Korean regulator rapidly re-wrote the licences start data for the commercial services, the Korean mobile operators signed-up half a dozen “celebrity” customers from the world of pop and sport and a commercial service officially commenced in South Korea one-hour ahead of the Verizon launch. The Samsung Galaxy S10 5G secured the prize of the world’s first 5G smartphone. The Moto Mod 5G can still claim to be the world’s first 5G non-smartphone device, as it can operate as a free standing cellular connected WiFi hotspot.