Mobile Phone History

1946: First Mobile Telephone Call

June 17, 1946 - A driver in St. Louis, Mo., pulled out a handset from under his car's dashboard, placed a phone call and made history. It was the first mobile telephone call. 

 

A team including Alton Dickieson and D. Mitchell from Bell Labs and future AT&T CEO H.I. Romnes, worked more than a decade to achieve this feat. By 1948, wireless telephone service was available in almost 100 cities and highway corridors. Customers included utilities, truck fleet operators and reporters. However, with only 5,000 customers making 30,000 weekly calls, the service was far from commonplace.
That "primitive" wireless network could not handle large call volumes. A single transmitter on a central tower provided a handful of channels for an entire metropolitan area. Between one and eight receiver towers handled the call return signals. At most, three subscribers could make calls at one time in any city. It was, in effect, a massive party line, where subscribers would have to listen first for someone else on the line before making a call.
Expensive and far from "mobile", the service cost $15 per month, plus 30 to 40 cents per local call, and the equipment weighed 80 pounds. Just as they would use a CB microphone, users depressed a button on the handset to talk and released it to listen.
Improved technology after 1965 brought a few more channels, customer dialing and eliminated the cumbersome handset. But capacity remained so limited that Bell System officials rationed the service to 40,000 subscribers guided by agreements with state regulatory agencies. For example, 2,000 subscribers in New York City shared just 12 channels, and typically waited 30 minutes to place a call. It was wireless, but with "strings" attached.

The Cellular Solution 

Something better — cellular telephone service — had been conceived in 1947 by D.H. Ring at Bell Labs, but the idea was not ready for prime time. The system comprised multiple low-power transmitters spread throughout a city in a hexagonal grid, with automatic call handoff from one hexagon to another and reuse of frequencies within a city. The technology to implement it didn't exist, and the frequencies needed were not available. The cellular concept lay fallow until the 1960s, when Richard Frenkiel and Joel Engel of Bell Labs applied computers and electronics to make it work.
AT&T turned their work into a proposal to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in December 1971. After years of hearings, the FCC approved the overall concept, but licensed two competing systems in each city.
In 1978, AT&T conducted FCC-authorized field trials in Chicago and Newark, N.J. Four years later, the FCC granted commercial licenses to an AT&T subsidiary, Advanced Mobile Phone Service Inc. (AMPS). AMPS was then divided among the local companies as part of the planning for divestiture. Illinois Bell opened the first commercial cellular system in October 1983. AT&T re-entered the cellular business by acquiring McCaw Cellular in 1994, the same year that President Clinton awarded Frenkiel and Engel the National Medal of Technology.
Today, AT&T Wireless (AWS) operates one of the largest digital wireless networks in North America. With more than 17 million subscribers, including partnerships and affiliates, and revenues exceeding $10 billion, AT&T Wireless is committed to being among the first to deliver the next generation of wireless products and services. AWS offers customers high-quality wireless communications services, whether mobile or fixed, voice or data, to businesses or consumers, in the United States and internationally.
Ref:  http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/46mobile.html

In The Beginning

Many of the early cell phones were considered to be “car phones,” as they were too large and cumbersome to carry around in a pocket or purse. However, in 1983, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x arrived on the market. Though huge by today’s standards, it was considered the first truly mobile phone because it was small enough to carry.

The phone, though incredibly expensive, became a pop culture symbol, showing up on everyone from Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, to high school heartbreaker, Zack Morris, in Saved by the Bell.

“You always have the trendsetters who are not afraid of trying new things and then everyone else follows,” says Patricia Grullon, an Industrial Design instructor at The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. “These trendsetters are key to make any product popular.”

However, cell phone use hadn’t spread to the general public yet.

“They were primarily used in the sales and business world, but not often for personal use like you see today,” says Kreg Jones, an industrial designer and Industrial Design instructor at The Art Institute of Philadelphia.

Though the DynaTac and subsequent models were smaller, mobile, and ultimately cooler, they still had their faults. Bulky, luggable models like the Nokia Mobira Talkman and the Motorola 2900 Bag Phone had longer battery lives and more talk time, making them more popular at the time. As the technology advanced, cell phone companies figured out how to pack all the features their customers wanted into a smaller, portable, more affordable model.

A Shifting Purpose

Early cell phones were just for talking. Gradually, features like voicemail were added, but the main purpose was talk. Eventually, cell phone manufacturers began to realize that they could integrate other technologies into their phone and expand its features. The earliest smartphones let users access email, and use the phone as a fax machine, pager, and address book.

In recent years, the purpose of the cell phone has shifted from a verbal communication tool to a multimedia tool, often adopting the name “mobile device” rather than being called a phone at all. We now use our cell phones more for surfing the web, checking email, snapping photos, and updating our social media status than actually placing calls.

“Rapidly expanding software titles, better screen resolution, and constantly improved interface make cell phones easier to navigate, and more fun to use. Add to that an expanding capacity that can hold as much memory as a computer would just a few years ago, and you can see why it’s an exploding market,” Grullon says.

The cell phones of today are also replacing our other gadgets, such as cameras and video cameras. When cameras were first introduced on phones, the images were low quality and the feature was considered to just be an extra.

“Now, we're seeing a very fast shift to where consumers don't even bother carrying their point-and-shoot cameras anymore, and just use their cell phones,” says Jamie Lendino, a tech journalist and senior mobile analyst for PCMag.com.

Modern day smartphones — the Apple iPhone in particular — changed everything that consumers expect from their phones. The app market has transformed the phone into a virtual toolbox with a solution for almost every need.

Changing Shape

It’s not just the technology of the cell phone that has changed over time, the physical design has also gone through a rollercoaster of changes. Original car phones and bag phones were as large as modern day computers and just as heavy.

“Like computers, the cell phone over time has become drastically smaller,” Jones says. He recalls reviewing focus group results while working with Ericsson GE Mobile in the mid-90s. “Customer research showed that the phone was so small that the user interface was unacceptable. Though the phone may have functioned perfectly well, their opinion was partially driven by the perception that the phone was simply too small.”

Eventually, customers’ perceptions shifted and they demanded a smaller, sleeker cell phone.

Just in recent years, cell phone designs have actually started to become larger and simpler, making room for a larger screen and less buttons. Because phones have become mobile media devices, the most desirable aspect is a large, clear, high-definition screen for optimal web viewing.  Even the keyboard is being taken away, replaced by a touch screen keyboard that only comes out when you need it. The most obvious example of this is the Apple iPhone and subsequent competitors like the Droid models.

Future of the Cell Phone

The cell phone has changed and developed so rapidly in the past decade that it seems as though almost anything you can imagine is possible for the future. According to Jones, the convergence of all our tech gadgets into one mobile device will continue to advance.  He anticipates that “the majority of the hardware and the software can be moved to ‘the cloud’ and the product will mainly be comprised of the input and the display.”

Lendino expects that the smartphone will eventually completely take over the market.

“Within a few more years, I expect regular cell phones to disappear entirely. We may not even call smartphones ‘smart’ anymore and just drop the term altogether, the way we stopped saying ‘color TV’ and ‘hi-fi stereo’,” he says.

Grullon believes that cell phones of the future will be adapted to appeal more to our emotional senses.

Ref : https://www.artinstitutes.edu/blog/the-history-and-evolution-of-cell-phones

Downloads Mobile Phone History PDF FILES

http://www.privateline.com/archive/TelenorPage_022-034.pdf 
http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~narayan/Course/Wireless_Revolution/vts%20article.pdf
http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/3760/11/11_chapter%203.pdf
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/cellular_history.pdf

Downloads Mobile Phone History PPT FILES

https://ttsw.com/SuesClasses/UNHCS107/StudentPresentationsFall06/Cell_Phones_and_Computers.ppt
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/naeuncho/Smartphones_and_Mobile_Phone_Technology.ppt
https://www.msu.edu/course/tc/200/presentation%20materials/mellos.ppt 
https://wiki.ercim.eu/wg/eMobility/images/d/d6/Mobile-Technologies.ppt
http://www.harding.edu/white/classes_old/engr475/lectures/lecture_1_history_of_telecomm.ppt