The Smartphone: From a 1973 Street Call to a Computer in Every Pocket

In 1973 a man stood on a New York street and made the first call from a handheld mobile phone. His phone weighed about as much as a bag of sugar, and the call lasted a few minutes. Half a century later, billions of people carry a device that is also a camera, a map, a bank branch, a music studio and a computer more powerful than anything the Apollo astronauts had. This guide traces how that happened, what is actually inside the glass slab, and how India became one of its biggest markets.

The call that started it

Before mobile phones, telephones were tied to a wire. Car phones existed from the middle of the 20th century, but they were bulky and needed a vehicle’s power. The idea of cellular networks, in which an area is divided into small “cells”, each with its own tower, was developed at Bell Labs in the 1940s and 1950s. The cells allow the same radio frequencies to be reused in different places, which lets thousands of people talk at once.

On 3 April 1973 Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, stood on a Manhattan street and called Joel Engel, a rival at Bell Labs, from a prototype handheld phone. The device that would become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X went on sale ten years later, in 1983. It weighed about 800 grams, offered around half an hour of talk time, needed about ten hours to charge and cost nearly four thousand dollars.

From phone to smartphone

The first phones did only one thing. The idea of adding a computer came early. In 1994 IBM and BellSouth launched the IBM Simon Personal Communicator, which had a touchscreen, an address book, a calendar, email and fax. It was a commercial flop, but its ideas were right. In 1996 Nokia released the 9000 Communicator with a full keyboard, and BlackBerry devices in the early 2000s made email in your pocket a business tool.

These phones were clever but awkward: small keyboards, styluses, and menus designed for a desktop. The leap needed a different idea about how people should interact with a computer.

2007: the touchscreen revolution

On 9 January 2007, Apple’s Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and it went on sale in June of that year. Its main idea was a large multi-touch screen that you could operate with your fingers, with no physical keyboard. It ran a real operating system and a full web browser. In 2008 Apple opened the App Store and Google released Android, with HTC’s Dream (T-Mobile G1) as the first Android phone. The App Store let anyone write software that could run on the phone, and the mobile app economy was born. You can read more in our guide to mobile apps.

Try it: how a touchscreen finds your finger

Most phone screens are capacitive. A grid of tiny electrodes under the glass senses a change in electric field when a conductive object, such as a finger, comes close. Move your pointer (or finger) over the grid. Each cell reports a signal strength, and the phone estimates your position by taking a weighted average of all the signals.

What is inside, step by step

A phone vs the Apollo computer

The Apollo Guidance Computer that took astronauts to the Moon in 1969 had about 4 kilobytes of working memory. Here is how far a modern phone with 8 gigabytes of memory has come, in a few lines of Python.

apollo_ram_kb = 4                     # approx. working memory of the Apollo Guidance Computer
phone_ram_gb = 8
phone_ram_kb = phone_ram_gb * 1024 * 1024
print(f"Phone memory is {phone_ram_kb // apollo_ram_kb:,}x the Apollo computer's RAM")

Output:

Phone memory is 2,097,152x the Apollo computer's RAM

That is only memory. Processing speed, storage and connectivity have grown by similar factors, thanks to the shrinking of the transistor.

Smartphones in India

India’s first mobile call was made on 31 July 1995 between Kolkata’s Writers’ Building and New Delhi, when West Bengal’s chief minister Jyoti Basu called Union Telecom Minister Sukh Ram. For years afterwards mobile calls were expensive, but prepaid plans and competition lowered prices steadily.

The biggest change came in 2016. Reliance Jio launched with very low-cost mobile data, and data prices across the country fell sharply. In the same year the National Payments Corporation of India launched the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which lets people pay from a phone through a bank-linked app. India is now among the world’s largest smartphone markets, and a large share of the phones sold in the country are assembled locally. For many Indians the smartphone is the first and only computer they use, for payments, video, study and small business.

Mind map: the smartphone at a glance

Common myths

• Myth: The iPhone was the first smartphone. Earlier devices like the IBM Simon and BlackBerry came before; the iPhone popularised multi-touch and apps.
• Myth: The first mobile phone was small. The first handheld weighed about 800 grams, and early prototypes were heavier.
• Myth: A phone just has a lot of processing power. Its sensors, camera and network connections are equally important.
• Myth: Phone batteries invented new chemistry for phones. They use lithium-ion technology developed from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Frequently asked questions

Keep exploring

Sources

• Smartphone, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Martin Cooper, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• iPhone, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Android operating system, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• National Payments Corporation of India, NPCI

Featured image: Image: Umut Çolak, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. Dates for early events are approximate; sizes and prices are rounded.