10 Fascinating Facts About Mobile Phones

Facts About Mobile Phones

1. The First Commercial Mobile Phone

 

The world's first mobile phone call was made in 1973 by Motorola employee Martin Cooper from the streets of New York City. He called his biggest rival. "I was calling Joel Engel who was my antagonist, my counterpart at AT&T;, which at the time was the biggest company in the world. We were a little company in Chicago. They considered us to be a flea on an elephant," Cooper told BBC.



"I said 'Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cellphone, a real, handheld, portable cellphone.' There was a silence at the other end. I suspect he was grinding his teeth."

The phone he called on was a prototype Motorola DynaTAC which, a decade later, was to become the world's first commercially available mobile handset. It got the FCC's thumbs up in 1983 and launched in 1984 at a cost of $3,995 -- which is about $9,000 today, accounting for inflation.

As a symbol for '80s yuppie tech, the DynaTAC appeared in Gordon Gekko's hands in Wall Street, and later, Patrick Bateman used one in American Psycho. It was also known as the "Zack Morris phone" because the Saved by the Bell character often used a similar model in the series.

The first mobile phone call in the UK took place in 1985. Comedian and one-half of Morecambe and Wise, Ernie Wise, called from London to Vodafone's Newbury, Berkshire offices, then located over a curry house.

 

2. The First Smartphone

The world's first smartphone debuted in 1993 at Florida's Wireless World Conference. Launched by BellSouth Cellular and "weighing in at a little more than a pound," it was a phone-come-PDA with an early LCD touchscreen display.

The press release from the launch describes the new handset: "Designed by IBM, Simon looks and acts like a cellular phone but offers much more than voice communications. In fact, users can employ Simon as a wireless machine, a pager, an electronic mail device, a calendar, an appointment schedular, an address book, a calculator and a pen-based sketchpad -- all at the suggested retail price of $899."

With only 2,000 Simons made, the handset is now a collector's item. The Microsoft-backed Bill Buxton Collection of retro tech boasts a Simon, and you can find out more about the pioneering device on the website.

 

3. The 160-Character Text Message Limit

There are various theories about who invented the text message. Short, text-based messaging was developed in a range of telecommunications systems toward the end of the 20th century, but the man credited with creating the SMS -- the mobile phone's short message service -- is German Friedhelm Hillebrand.

Working for the GSM group, Hillebrand came up with the concept of a 128-byte text message to be sent via the existing mobile phone network. The message's shortness was an obvious parameter due to the size limit, but the exact 160-character limitation was a curious creation of Hillebrand's.

The story goes that in 1985 Hillebrand experimented with making notes on his typewriter to come up with the ideal message length. "Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters," the L.A. Times reports.

He ultimately deemed the 160-character limit as "perfectly sufficient," and with two more "convincing arguments" (postcards and Telex transmissions often had fewer than 150 characters), the GSM group created the standard in 1986. Afterwards, all mobile phone carriers and mobile phones were ordered to support it.

Nowadays you can send messages longer than 160 characters, but Hillebrand's legacy lives on via Twitter. The micro-blogging service's 140-character limit was determined by text messaging -- 140 characters for the tweet and 20 for the Twitter username.

Image courtesy of kamshots

 

4. The Pocket Dialing Problem

Chances are you've received a "phantom" call on your mobile phone, especially if your name begins with an "A." "Pocket (or 'butt') dialing," when a jostled phone calls a number from someone's pocket or bag, is one of the minor annoyances of mobile life.

For the emergency services though, it's a more serious problem. In the early 2000s the National Emergency Number Association revealed that "phantom wireless calls" made up about 70% of 911 calls in some U.S. areas. In the UK the figure reached as many as 11,000 calls per day.

So why is a pocket dial so likely to reach 911 or 999? Although a phone's keypad may have been "locked," these numbers will still dial in case of a real emergency. In fact, many older American mobiles auto-dialled 911 when a caller pressed and held number nine, or two numbers at once.

Phone designers and manufacturers have now disabled such options, but pocket dialing still happens. Last year two men were overheard during a car burglary after one of their phones called 911. In May of this year a drug dealer was arrested after he pocket-dialed the police during a deal. And a Maine man with an arrest warrant was "triangulated" and caught when he repeatedly called the police from his pocket.

Image courtesy of Laram777

 

5. The World's Most Expensive Mobile Phone

British jeweler Stuart Hughes lays claim to creating the world's most expensive mobile phone. The iPhone 4 "Diamond Rose" edition boasts a price tag of £5 million, which currently translates to $8,184,968.42.

For that astonishing sum, the purchaser gets 500 individual flawless diamonds totaling over 100 carats, a rose gold Apple logo with 53 diamonds, and a single cut 7.4-carat pink diamond on the home button.

Hughes has also bundled in an 8 carat single cut flawless diamond which can replace the pink one, just in case you needed a sweetener to seal the deal.

 

6. Fake Plastic Trees

With nearly two-million mobile phone towers and antennas in the U.S., you'd expect to see one on every street corner. The fact is, they are very often disguised. In urban areas, clever engineers have developed ways to install the equipment into signs, clock faces, drainpipes, telephone poles, church and catherdral roofs and even weather vanes.

One of the most noted ways of "disguising" a mobile phone tower, however, is in plastic trees. The website Fraud Frond "pays homage to the fake trees that disguise our cell phone towers." There's even a "fake plastic trees" Flickr group. The photographer Robert Voit recently held an entire exhibition dedicated to photos of the phenomenon.

"Many people don't know about these things," says the Fraud Frond site. "They're hidden pretty well. But if you look for 'em, they're easy to spot."

Image courtesy of Allan Ferguson

 

7. Telephonophobia, Nomophobia, Frigensophobia & Ringxiety

Our relationship with our mobile phones hasn't always been an easy one. Aside from the etiquette issues a portable phone involves, some sources suggest our mental health has suffered too.

With varying degrees of plausibility, experts have identified telephonophobia, nomophobia, frigensophobia and ringxiety (or fauxcellarm) as conditions that can affect the mobile phone generation.

Telephonobia is the fear of making or recieving phone calls.

Nomophobia (no-mobile-phone phobia) is the fear of being out of contact either by your phone being lost, out of juice or out of signal range.

"Ringxiety" or "fauxcellarm" is described as a "psycho-acoustic phenomenon" when you hear (or feel) your mobile ringing when it's not.

Frigensophobia is the fear that using your mobile is damaging your brain.

Image courtesy of Olle Svensson

 

8. The Invention of Voicemail

In 1986 Scott Jones, a 26-year-old research scientist at MIT, invented the modern cellular voicemail system over a pizza.

Although the American mobile phone carriers had regulation-based legal issues to surmount before they could offer voicemail to the masses, Jones' startup Boston Technology won bids to create the voicemail systems for the mobile industry's big names.

While we now take voicemail for granted (and may even get fed up with it), in the late '80s it was an exciting prospect. Here's an excerpt from an article of the time that explains the concept:

"Company executive Gray, for instance, may need to convey a question to Smith, who is out of town, before the board meeting the next morning. Gray leaves a memo on Smith's 'voice mailbox.' Smith calls in later that afternoon and realizes he cannot answer Gray's question, so he appends a personal note to Gray's memo and redirects it to company counsel Brown's mailbox. Brown returns from his luncheon appointment, receives the message, and gets to work. By 10 p.m. he comes up with a solution, leaves his response in Gray's voice mailbox, and goes home. The following morning, Gray dials his office number and listens to Brown's message. No time or energy has been wasted."

Image courtesy of FaceMePLS

 

9. Textonyms

We're all aware of text speak, but are you familiar with textonyms? You've no doubt been affected by them at some point in your mobile life. Born from mobile phone predictive text systems, a textonym is a word that that is typed using the same order of keys on a numeric keypad as another word. A classic example is "home," which can also appear as "good" or "gone," as they're all created by typing "4663."

An increase in QWERTY keyboards and more "intelligent" software means that textonym faux pas are now being replaced by auto-correct faux pas, but not before textonyms made the crossover from mobile to real life. "Book" entered the vocab of hip, lazy teens as a new word for "cool" because it was the default when typing "2665."

Image courtesy of Ken Banks

 

10. The Best-Selling Mobile Phone

If hype was everything, you might assume the Apple iPhone was the best-selling handset to date. With the recent news that 100 million iPhones have been sold, Apple has certainly made the top five, but it's far behind the bestseller.

The world's most popular phone is the Nokia 1100, a basic GSM candybar launched in 2003. Over 250 million 1100s have been sold. Nokia's 3210 and 3310 also made the top five, while the last slot belongs to the iconic Motorola RAZR.

The 1100 made headlines in 2009 when German models were said to be changing hands for as much as $32,000, after reports indicated the handset could "intercept" info from other phones. This was eventually revealed to be a hoax.