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Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland. He was a well known scientist and inventor.
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Bell launched the telephone era with the first bi-directional electronic transmission of the spoken word.
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Popular from the 1890s to the 1930s, the candlestick phone was separated into two pieces. The mouth piece formed the candlestick part, and the receiver was placed by your ear during the phone call.
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The rotary phone became popular. To dial, you would rotate the dial to the number you wanted, and then release. Based on my limited interaction with rotary dial phones, this must have been incredibly tedious. As push-button phones gained popularity in the 1960s and ’70s, t
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Portable, or cordless, phones were the phone equivalent of the TV remote. You were no longer physically attached to your phone’s base station. Beginning in the 1980s, portable phones were like a small-scale cell phone.
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One of many classic Nokia candybar-style phones, the Nokia 5110 was rugged and had a long battery life. More importantly, you could play Snake on its 47 × 84 pixel screen. The 5110 was also customizable, with replaceable face plates.
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The Motorola StarTAC was the first successful flip phone, and in many ways, the first successful consumer cell phone. Introduced in 1996, Motorola eventually sold 60 million StarTACs.
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Canadian-based Research in Motion, now BlackBerry, was by far the leading smartphone manufacturer in the 2000s. With their advanced email capabilities, BlackBerry Messenger, and physical keyboards, BlackBerry smartphones were the ultimate business phone.
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When the iPhone was announced in 2007, many BlackBerry fans scoffed at its lack of a physical keyboard. Now that touchscreen smartphones have proved themselves worthy, BlackBerry has fallen rapidly, with many failed attempts at touchscreen smartphones, and is currently struggling to survive.
