The first experimental hand-held mobile telephone was demonstrated in 1973 by Motorola and weighed around 1 kg, but it was not until 1983 that the first devices went on sale. These early devices were large and heavy, had a short battery life, and were capable only of making telephone calls.
It was not until 1993 that manufacturers began to add extra features to mobile phones, such as a calendar, address book, clock, email and simple games. The first of these was IBM’s Simon handset.
Around the same time, hand-held computers (often called PDAs – personal digital assistants) began to appear that offered basic computing tasks in the palm of your hand.
These were commonly used with a stylus (like a pen) to tap a touch-sensitive screen. The most successful of these was the Palm range of hand-helds (left). These devices could not make phone calls or send text messages – they were simple hand-held computers. They were, however, very popular and made Palm one of the most successful technology companies of the late 1990s.
These early smartphones were… well, not that smart. They could send and receive emails and perform a range of basic office functions for business users but were not particularly user-friendly.
In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, which was aimed initially at consumers. The iPhone was a genuine ‘game-changer’ and was the first mobile phone to feature a multi-touch interface. Until then, touch screens had been available on many devices (such as the Palm Pilot) but could sense only one point of touch at a time.
The ability to sense more than one point of touch on a screen may seem like only a small improvement on single-point touch, but think of all the actions you can perform on a modern multi-touch device. It brought about the possibility of gesture-based interfaces where you can swipe, pinch, and zoom with your fingers.
In just a few years, multi-touch interfaces have spread to many devices and have become steadily cheaper. It is difficult to foresee us ever going back to devices with lots of physical buttons to press.
Modern smartphones bring together technologies, such as GPS, Bluetooth and the accelerometer – and, of course, wireless Internet access.
This is an example of convergence – that is, integrating technologies, which were once separate, into a single device.
Mobile app creation is still a very new industry but is already worth billions of dollars per year.
Whilst many mobile apps are created by professional software development companies, there are also many ‘bedroom developers’ – those who create mobile apps in their spare time, either as a hobby or as a sideline to their main job. It is also an industry dominated by young developers.
In February 2012, it was reported that, since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, the ‘app economy’ had created an estimated 466,000 jobs in the USA alone [1].
Maybe you will go on to make a career in this industry!
[1] Source: Where The Jobs Are: The App Economy, Dr Michael Mandel, South Mountain Economics.