Cell Phones - A Little History
As readers of my column know, I really do like my iPhone.
A few days ago, I deliberately left it at home when I went out. Within minutes, I wanted - no, needed - to look something up. What on earth did I do before I had a smart phone? I had to wait for information?? I couldn't text? No apps?? Say it ain't so.
That realization - how much I now depended upon my iPhone for what I had come to believe were nothing short of my rights as a human - got me thinking about LBiP. (Life Before iPhone.) Specifically, I began to remember the many cell phones that had passed through my hands over the years.
Cell phone technology has been around much longer than their popular adoption in the 80s. In fact, this unintentionally amusing paragraph from What is the History of Cell Phones (http://www.tech-faq.com/history-of-cell-phones.shtml) tells us, "The technology of modern cell phones started with the creation of hexagonal cells for mobile phones by D.H. Ring from Bell Labs in 1947, later on another engineer from Bell Labs conceived of cell towers that would transmit and receive signals in three directions instead of normal bi directional antennas. However, although some technologies have been developed, electronics and other technologies would take decades to mature and to be developed. For instance, the electronics that were used in the first cell phones were first developed in the 1960s."
In the late 80s my videographer had a car phone, a big, clunky, military-looking thing that might or might not make faltering contact with the outside world. Again, from What is the History of Cell Phones, "From 1983 to the end of the 1980's cell phones grew in popularity due to the innovations in cellular networks that were able to handle phone calls in either one area or hand them off to other areas. While most cell phones weren't made to be carried in your hand, all phones were made for permanent installation in the car. For a while the term "car phone" was extremely popular. Besides car phones, there were a few models that came in tote bag type configurations that can easily hook up to a car's battery, via the DC outlet to make calls. There were also a few models that came as briefcases, to hold large batteries necessary to make phone calls."
It was during the 90s that most of us adopted the cell phone. Going into business for myself made it a logical decision (any excuse for a new toy!) as well as a write-off. After all, you had to be available anywhere, any time for those clients, right? I recall one of my earliest phones was the Motorola Star-TAC, which made me just too cool for school.
These phones were considered second generation, or 2G. They were truly portable, small (easily slipped into a pocket or purse), but had annoying features like pull-out antennae that broke regularly, and came with basic batteries that just didn't have much usage time in them. 2G phones also introduced SMS texting to the world. This was quickly adopted by kids, but it really wasn't until the advent of the 3G phones that texting became ubiquitous, for some of us, almost replacing voice communications.
It was also around this time that people started investing in the so-called "smart phones," which did more than just allow voice and text communications, but allowed the user to run applications, and launch an internet browser. PC World says, "If you're one of the many fans of the Palm OS-based Treo phone, you might want to thank Kyocera. The company's QCP6035 smart phone, which hit the retail market in early 2001 and cost between $400 and $500 (depending on the carrier), was the first Palm-based phone to be widely available to users. It included a measly 8MB of memory, and sported a bland monochrome display, but it paved the way for future products."
Because these new phones were used for so much more than phone calls - and because texting was more and more important to our style of communicating - keyboards became (and continue to be) increasingly important.
My early texting was done on a Motorola Razr, and I have to tell you that that was a pain in the thumb. Texting with a standard phone keypad (each number having three alpha keys associated with it - except for the 7 and 9, each with four (just trying texting a word with "r's" in it)) was an exercise in aggravation. Not only were messages painful to create, the phones offered no "thread," so a text would often fly in out of nowhere with a cryptic reference to something you said hours earlier and couldn't for the life of you remember.
The addictive nature of the smart phone was first identified with the Blackberry 5810's nickname - the "Crackberry." Introduced in 2002, the Blackberry actually moved from PDA to cell phone, rather than the other way around. Lacking a speaker (it required a headset), it wasn't the ideal cell phone, but it did offer an extensive package of apps, and more and more users could be seen carrying their Blackberry around with them everywhere they went, drifting off into the ether from time to time in what has now become the socially accepted "phone moment." (At a party recently, I looked across the room and saw no fewer than five people actively engaged with their cell phones.)
The breakthrough iPhone, of course, introduced the first non-keypad keypad, the entire interface of the iPhone being based on touchscreen technology that completely reconsidered the way the user interacts with his phone. This phone is also part of the 3G, or 3rd generation of cell phone. The 3G phones are truly living up to the promise of high data rates and multimedia applications included with plain-vanilla phone conversations.
Interestingly, the cell phone might have moved into widespread use much faster had the FCC had the foresight of researchers at AT&T.
As we're told at the website "Selling the Cell Phone - The History of Cellular Phones, "The basic concept of cellular phones began in 1947, when researchers looked at crude mobile (car) phones and realized that by using small cells (range of service area) with frequency reuse they could increase the traffic capacity of mobile phones substantially. However at that time, the technology to do so was nonexistent.
"Anything to do with broadcasting and sending a radio or television message out over the airwaves comes under Federal Communications Commission(FCC) regulation. A cell phone is a type of two-way radio. In 1947, AT&T proposed that the FCC allocate a large number of radio-spectrum frequencies so that widespread mobile telephone service would become feasible and AT&T would have a incentive to research the new technology. We can partially blame the FCC for the gap between the initial concept of cellular service and its availability to the public. The FCC decided to limit the amount of frequencies available in 1947, the limits made only twenty-three phone conversations possible simultaneously in the same service area - not a market incentive for research.
"The FCC reconsidered its position in 1968, stating "if the technology to build a better mobile service works, we will increase the frequencies allocation, freeing the airwaves for more mobile phones." AT&T and Bell Labs proposed a cellular system to the FCC of many small, low-powered, broadcast towers, each covering a 'cell' a few miles in radius and collectively covering a larger area. Each tower would use only a few of the total frequencies allocated to the system. As the phones traveled across the area, calls would be passed from tower to tower."
Cell phones are so much a part of everyday life now, many people have abandoned their landlines altogether.
And I can only imagine that I have seen the future when, one evening recently, my entire family was sitting together in the living room, each of us engaged with our cell phone - and nobody talking at all.
A few days ago, I deliberately left it at home when I went out. Within minutes, I wanted - no, needed - to look something up. What on earth did I do before I had a smart phone? I had to wait for information?? I couldn't text? No apps?? Say it ain't so.
That realization - how much I now depended upon my iPhone for what I had come to believe were nothing short of my rights as a human - got me thinking about LBiP. (Life Before iPhone.) Specifically, I began to remember the many cell phones that had passed through my hands over the years.
Cell phone technology has been around much longer than their popular adoption in the 80s. In fact, this unintentionally amusing paragraph from What is the History of Cell Phones (http://www.tech-faq.com/history-of-cell-phones.shtml) tells us, "The technology of modern cell phones started with the creation of hexagonal cells for mobile phones by D.H. Ring from Bell Labs in 1947, later on another engineer from Bell Labs conceived of cell towers that would transmit and receive signals in three directions instead of normal bi directional antennas. However, although some technologies have been developed, electronics and other technologies would take decades to mature and to be developed. For instance, the electronics that were used in the first cell phones were first developed in the 1960s."
In the late 80s my videographer had a car phone, a big, clunky, military-looking thing that might or might not make faltering contact with the outside world. Again, from What is the History of Cell Phones, "From 1983 to the end of the 1980's cell phones grew in popularity due to the innovations in cellular networks that were able to handle phone calls in either one area or hand them off to other areas. While most cell phones weren't made to be carried in your hand, all phones were made for permanent installation in the car. For a while the term "car phone" was extremely popular. Besides car phones, there were a few models that came in tote bag type configurations that can easily hook up to a car's battery, via the DC outlet to make calls. There were also a few models that came as briefcases, to hold large batteries necessary to make phone calls."
It was during the 90s that most of us adopted the cell phone. Going into business for myself made it a logical decision (any excuse for a new toy!) as well as a write-off. After all, you had to be available anywhere, any time for those clients, right? I recall one of my earliest phones was the Motorola Star-TAC, which made me just too cool for school.
These phones were considered second generation, or 2G. They were truly portable, small (easily slipped into a pocket or purse), but had annoying features like pull-out antennae that broke regularly, and came with basic batteries that just didn't have much usage time in them. 2G phones also introduced SMS texting to the world. This was quickly adopted by kids, but it really wasn't until the advent of the 3G phones that texting became ubiquitous, for some of us, almost replacing voice communications.
It was also around this time that people started investing in the so-called "smart phones," which did more than just allow voice and text communications, but allowed the user to run applications, and launch an internet browser. PC World says, "If you're one of the many fans of the Palm OS-based Treo phone, you might want to thank Kyocera. The company's QCP6035 smart phone, which hit the retail market in early 2001 and cost between $400 and $500 (depending on the carrier), was the first Palm-based phone to be widely available to users. It included a measly 8MB of memory, and sported a bland monochrome display, but it paved the way for future products."
Because these new phones were used for so much more than phone calls - and because texting was more and more important to our style of communicating - keyboards became (and continue to be) increasingly important.
My early texting was done on a Motorola Razr, and I have to tell you that that was a pain in the thumb. Texting with a standard phone keypad (each number having three alpha keys associated with it - except for the 7 and 9, each with four (just trying texting a word with "r's" in it)) was an exercise in aggravation. Not only were messages painful to create, the phones offered no "thread," so a text would often fly in out of nowhere with a cryptic reference to something you said hours earlier and couldn't for the life of you remember.
The addictive nature of the smart phone was first identified with the Blackberry 5810's nickname - the "Crackberry." Introduced in 2002, the Blackberry actually moved from PDA to cell phone, rather than the other way around. Lacking a speaker (it required a headset), it wasn't the ideal cell phone, but it did offer an extensive package of apps, and more and more users could be seen carrying their Blackberry around with them everywhere they went, drifting off into the ether from time to time in what has now become the socially accepted "phone moment." (At a party recently, I looked across the room and saw no fewer than five people actively engaged with their cell phones.)
The breakthrough iPhone, of course, introduced the first non-keypad keypad, the entire interface of the iPhone being based on touchscreen technology that completely reconsidered the way the user interacts with his phone. This phone is also part of the 3G, or 3rd generation of cell phone. The 3G phones are truly living up to the promise of high data rates and multimedia applications included with plain-vanilla phone conversations.
Interestingly, the cell phone might have moved into widespread use much faster had the FCC had the foresight of researchers at AT&T.
As we're told at the website "Selling the Cell Phone - The History of Cellular Phones, "The basic concept of cellular phones began in 1947, when researchers looked at crude mobile (car) phones and realized that by using small cells (range of service area) with frequency reuse they could increase the traffic capacity of mobile phones substantially. However at that time, the technology to do so was nonexistent.
"Anything to do with broadcasting and sending a radio or television message out over the airwaves comes under Federal Communications Commission(FCC) regulation. A cell phone is a type of two-way radio. In 1947, AT&T proposed that the FCC allocate a large number of radio-spectrum frequencies so that widespread mobile telephone service would become feasible and AT&T would have a incentive to research the new technology. We can partially blame the FCC for the gap between the initial concept of cellular service and its availability to the public. The FCC decided to limit the amount of frequencies available in 1947, the limits made only twenty-three phone conversations possible simultaneously in the same service area - not a market incentive for research.
"The FCC reconsidered its position in 1968, stating "if the technology to build a better mobile service works, we will increase the frequencies allocation, freeing the airwaves for more mobile phones." AT&T and Bell Labs proposed a cellular system to the FCC of many small, low-powered, broadcast towers, each covering a 'cell' a few miles in radius and collectively covering a larger area. Each tower would use only a few of the total frequencies allocated to the system. As the phones traveled across the area, calls would be passed from tower to tower."
Cell phones are so much a part of everyday life now, many people have abandoned their landlines altogether.
And I can only imagine that I have seen the future when, one evening recently, my entire family was sitting together in the living room, each of us engaged with our cell phone - and nobody talking at all.
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