
the history of mobile phones goes back to 1908 when a US Patent was issued in Kentucky for a wireless telephone.
Mobile phones were invented as early as the 1940s when engineers working at AT&T developed cells for mobile phone base stations.
The very first mobile phones were not really mobile phones at all. They were two-way radios that allowed people like taxi drivers and the emergency services to communicate.
These early mobile phones are often referred to as 0G mobile phones, or Zero Generation mobile phones. Most phones today rely on 3G or 4G mobile technology.
1946: The first calls were made on a car radiotelephone in Chicago. Due to the small number of radio frequencies available, the service quickly reached capacity.
1999: Emojis were invented by Shigetaka Kurita in Japan. Unlike their all-text predecessors emoticons, emojis are pictures. The same year in the UK sees the first shots fired in a supermarket price war, with Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda selling Pay and Go phones at discounted prices. For the first time, you could pick up a mobile phone for just under £40.

2000: The all-conquering Nokia 3310 crash landed on shop shelves. Naturally it was unscathed and went on to sell 126 million units. Over in Japan, the first commercially available camera phone The Sharp J-SH04, launched in November 2000 in Japan. The only snag? you could only use it in Japan. Europe wouldn’t get its first camera phone until the arrival of the Nokia 6750 in 2002.
2003: The 3G standard started to be adopted worldwide, kicking off the age of mobile internet and paving the way for the rise of smartphones. Honk Kong-based Hutchinson Wampoa owned Three brand offered the first 3G network connection in the UK among other countries. Staying very much on-brand, Three ranged a trio of 3G handsets, namely: the Motorola A830, the NEC e606 and NEC e808.
2007: The iPhone debuted. Solely available on O2 at launch in the UK and priced at a then eye-watering $499, Nokia CEO confidently dismissed it as little more than a ‘cool phone’ that wouldn’t translate column inches into market share.
2008: The first Android phone turned up, in the form of the T-Mobile G1. Now dubbed the O.G of Android phones, it was a long way from the high-end Android smartphones we use today. Not least because it retained a physical keyboard and a BlackBerry-style trackball for navigation. This year also saw the advent of both Apple’s App Store and Android Market, later renamed Google Play Store, paving the way for our modern-day app culture and creating a $77 billion industry.
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