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The first ever cellphone
Cite Prior to 1973, mobile telephony was limited to phones installed in cars and other vehicles. Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone. On 3 April 1973 when Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs. The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Cooper weighed 1.1 kg and measured 23 cm long, 13 cm deep and 4.45 cm wide. -
1G Network Available
CiteOn March 6th 1983, the DynaTAC mobile phone launched on the first US 1G network by Ameritech. It cost $100m to develop, and took over a decade to reach the market. The phone had a talk time of just thirty-five minutes and took ten hours to charge. Consumer demand was strong despite the battery life, weight, and low talk time, and waiting lists were in the thousands. -
2G
CiteIn the 1990s, the 'second generation' mobile phone systems emerged. These differed from the previous generation by using digital instead of analog transmission, and also fast out-of-band phone-to-network signaling. The rise in mobile phone usage as a result of 2G was explosive and this era also saw the advent of prepaid mobile phones. This also introduced text messaging -
3G
The main technological difference that distinguishes 3G technology from 2G technology is the use of packet switching rather than circuit switching for data transmission. 3G came across in the 2000's -
First IPhone
CiteThe iPhone was released on June 29, 2007 in the United States where thousands of people were reported to have waited outside Apple and AT&T retail stores days before the device's launch; with many stores reporting stock shortages within an hour. To avoid repeating the problems of the PlayStation 3 launch, which caused burglaries and even a shooting, off-duty police officers were hired to guard stores overnight. -
The First Android Phone
CiteOn November 5, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of technology companies including Google, device manufacturers such as HTC, Sony and Samsung, wireless carriers such as Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile, and chipset makers such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, unveiled itself, with a goal to develop open standards for mobile devices. -
4G
by 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media. Consequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized 4th-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to 10-fold over existing 3G technologies. The first two commercially available technologies billed as 4G were the WiMAX standard (offered in the U.S. by Sprint) and the LTE standard -
