The telephone has come a long way to get to the slim, sleek, colour-popping smartphones we all know and love today.
One could perhaps say that the phone as we know it today came about thanks to a huge technological leap made by Apple in 2007, when they released their first iPhone.
To remember the phone the way it should be remembered, let’s take a look back at a timeline of the history of the telephone from the day it all began in 1876.
• 10 March 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell made the first-ever call on a telephone, to his assistant, Thomas Watson.
• 25 January 1915 – Alexander Graham Bell makes history yet again as he conducts the first-ever transcontinental phone call from New York City to San Francisco.
• 3 April 1973 – First mobile phone call is made by Martin Cooper of Motorola to Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T’s Bell Labs with Motorola’s first DynaTAC prototype.
• 13 October 1983 – David Meilahn placed the first commercial wireless call on a DynaTAC 8000X to Bob Barnett, former president of Ameritech Mobile Communications. The DynaTAC 8000X was the first commercially available mobile phone. It weighed about 800g and cost an astounding $4 000 (equivalent to $10 022,25 or R126 949,84 today).
• 1994 – The IBM Simon is released as the first phone to feature software applications (apps) using a stylus and touch screen. The Simon cost $899 (equivalent to $1 513,83 or R19 160,17 today) and only ever worked in the USA, operating within a 15-state network.
• May 1999 – The Kyocera VP-210 Visual Phone was released as the first-ever videophone.
• 2000 – The Samsung SPH-M100 Uproar was released as the first phone with MP3 music capabilities, albeit for only about one hour of play time.
• 2000 – The Motorola i605 was released as the first mobile phone capable of using Bluetooth.
• 2003 – The Nokia 1100, the most-sold mobile device of all time, was released. More than 250 million devices were sold before discontinuation in 2009.
• 2007 – Apple revolutionises the mobile phone industry with the release of the first iPhone.
• 2008 – The HTC Dream (or Google G1) was the first smartphone to run the Linux-based Android operating system, which was later purchased and further developed by Google.
• 2009 – The Blackberry Curve 8520 was released commercially.
• 2010 – The Samsung Galaxy S was the first of Samsung’s S series phones to be released. At the time, it was considered the closest competitor to Apple’s iPhone series.
• 2016 – Apple got rid of the 3,5mm headphone jack from their iPhone range when they released the iPhone 7.
• November 2017 – Apple released their latest flagship device – the iPhone X –the first phone to extend its screen to ‘wrap’ around the headset speaker at the top of the phone. The ‘notches’ at the top of the screen are used to display notifications among other aspects.
• March 2018 – Samsung released their latest flagship device, the Samsung Galaxy S9. This changed the game when it came to slow motion footage capture by a phone with a camera capable of capturing footage at 960fps (frames per second).
• March 2018 – Huawei released a direct competitor to the iPhone X, the Huawei P20. It also featured the ‘notches’ at the top of the screen, but consumers had the option to switch them off if they did not want them. It also got rid of the 3,5mm headphone jack, leaving Samsung as the only one among the big three smartphone producers – Apple, Huawei and Samsung – to provide a headphone jack.
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