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Reginald Fesseden
In Christmas Eve of 1906 Reginald Fesseden demonstrates the first wireless radio telephone with him playing "O Holy Night" played on the violin and a reading of a short passage of the Bible -
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History of Cell Phone
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Base Stations for Mobile Phones
The introduction of cells for mobile phone base stations, invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T, was further developed by Bell Labs during the 1960s. -
Nokia Introduces 1rst Mobile Phone
It may look more like a boombox than a portable phone, but this boxy, bulky device was actually Nokia's first mobile (if you can call it that) phone. Introduced in 1982, the Nokia Mobira Senator was designed for use in cars. After all, you wouldn't want to use this phone while walking: It weighed about 21 pounds. -
First Text Message
Text messaging, also known as Short Message Service (SMS), began in the late 1980’s by a group of Europeans who were trying to improve systems for the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM), but was used by a civilian in 1993 by an engineering student totally by accident. -
Bluetooth Technlogy Introduced
Its intended basic purpose was to be a wire replacement technology in order to rapidly transfer voice and data. There were many doubters who believed Bluetooth would be a distant memory in just a couple of years. However, multiple years have passed and Bluetooth continues to make strides and advancements everyday. -
First Smart Phone
Early Smart Phone: Kyocera QCP6035 (2000)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. -
PDA Mixed with a Phone
Back when Palm and Handspring were still rivals, Handspring made waves with the Treo 180. More PDA than phone, the Treo 180 came in two versions: one with a QWERTY keyboard for typing (pictured), and another (the Treo 180g) that used Graffiti text input instead. Like the Kyocera QCP6035, it featured a monochrome screen, but boasted 16MB of memory. -
Camera Phone
Today, most cell phones come with a built-in camera. But, just a few years ago, a camera phone was hard to come by. In 2002, Sanyo and Sprint debuted the Sanyo SCP-5300 PCS phone, which they claimed was the first mobile phone available in America with a built-in camera. (A camera phone from Sharp had been available in Japan for a few years.) At its highest resolution, it captured VGA (640 by 480) images--a far cry from today's 5-megapixel camera phones like the Nokia N95. -
Cell Phone Recycling Act
In late September, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the Cell Phone Recycling Act of 2004 (Assembly Bill 2901), which requires cell phone sellers to take back and recycle old phones at no cost to consumers, beginning on July 1, 2006. -
The Music Phone
It promised to bring together the best of two worlds: Apple's excellent iTunes music player and Motorola's cell phone design expertise. The Motorola Rokr, released in September 2005, was the first music phone to incorporate Apple's music software. It allowed users to transfer songs purchased from iTunes to the phone for listening on the go. Unfortunately, users found song transfers to be painfully slow and stymied by the 100-song limit imposed on their music collections.
