Cell Phone History

Editor's Note: Here, you will learn more interesting facts. 
(Excerpt from WikiPedia}

Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first publicized handheld mobile phone call on a prototype DynaTAC model on April 4, 1973. This is a reenactment in 2007.

A handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a “pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone”. Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from ships and trains. The race to create truly portable telephone devices began after World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. The advances in mobile telephony have been traced in successive “generations”, starting with the early “0G” (zeroth generation) services, such as Bell System’s Mobile Telephone Service and its successor, the Improved Mobile Telephone Service. These “0G” systems were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, and were very expensive.
The first handheld mobile cell phone was demonstrated by Motorola in 1973. The first commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1979. This was followed in 1981 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.[6] Several other countries then followed in the early to mid-1980s. These first-generation (1G) systems could support far more simultaneous calls, but still used analog technology.

In 1991, the second-generation (2G) digital cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard. This sparked competition in the sector as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators.

Ten years later, in 2001, the third generation (3G) was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard.[7] This was followed by 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancements based on the high-speed packet access (HSPA) family, allowing UMTS networks to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

By 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications, such as streaming media.[8] Consequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized fourth-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to ten-fold over existing 3G technologies. The first two commercially available technologies billed as 4G were the WiMAX standard, offered in North America by Sprint, and the LTE standard, first offered in Scandinavia by TeliaSonera.

Features

All mobile phones have a variety of features in common, but manufacturers seek product differentiation by adding functions to attract consumers. This competition has led to great innovation in mobile phone development over the past 20 years.

The common components found on all phones are:

A battery, providing the power source for the phone functions.
An input mechanism to allow the user to interact with the phone. The most common input mechanism is a keypad, but touch screens are also found in most smartphones.
A screen which echoes the user’s typing, displays text messages, contacts and more.
Basic mobile phone services to allow users to make calls and send text messages.
All GSM phones use a SIM card to allow an account to be swapped among devices. Some CDMA devices also have a similar card called a R-UIM.
Individual GSM, WCDMA, iDEN and some satellite phone devices are uniquely identified by an International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number.

Low-end mobile phones are often referred to as feature phones, and offer basic telephony.  Handsets with more advanced computing ability through the use of native software applications became known as smartphones.

Several phone series have been introduced to address specific market segments, such as the RIM BlackBerry focusing on enterprise/corporate customer email needs, the Sony-Ericsson ‘Walkman’ series of music/phones and ‘Cyber-shot’ series of camera/phones, the Nokia Nseries of multimedia phones, the Palm Pre, the HTC Dream and the Apple iPhone.

The world’s largest individual mobile operator by number of subscribers is China Mobile, which has over 500 million mobile phone subscribers. Over 50 mobile operators have over ten million subscribers each, and over 150 mobile operators had at least one million subscribers by the end of 2009.  In 2014, there were more than seven billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide, a number that is expected to keep growing.

Prior to 2010, Nokia was the market leader. However, since then competition has emerged in the Asia Pacific region, from brands such as Micromax, Nexian and i-Mobile, which have chipped away at Nokia’s market share. Android-powered smartphones have also gained momentum across the region at the expense of Nokia. In India, Nokia’s market share dropped significantly to around 31% from 56% in the same period. Its share was displaced by Chinese and Indian vendors of low-end mobile phones.

In Q1 2012, according to Strategy Analytics, Samsung surpassed Nokia, selling 93.5 million units as against Nokia’s 82.7 million units. In 2012 Standard & Poor’s downgraded Nokia to “junk” status, at BB+/B, with negative outlook due to high loss and an expected further decline owing to insufficient growth in Lumia smartphone sales to offset a rapid decline in revenue from Symbian-based smartphones that was forecast for subsequent quarters.

In Q3 2014, the top ten manufacturers were Samsung (20.6%), Nokia (9.5%), Apple Inc. (8.4%), LG (4.2%), Huawei (3.6%), TCL Communication (3.5), Xiaomi (3.5%), Lenovo (3.3%), ZTE (3.0%) and Micromax (2.2%).

Other manufacturers outside the top five include TCL Communication, Lenovo, Sony Mobile Communications, Motorola and LG Electronics. Smaller current and past players include Audiovox (now UTStarcom), BenQ-Siemens, BlackBerry, Casio, CECT, Coolpad, Fujitsu, HTC, Just5, Intex, Karbonn Mobiles, Kyocera, Lumigon, Micromax Mobile, Mitsubishi Electric, Modu, NEC, Neonode, Openmoko, Panasonic, Palm, Pantech Wireless Inc., Philips, Sagem, Sanyo, Sharp, Sierra Wireless, SK Teletech, Trium and Toshiba.

Future evolution

5G is a technology and term used in research papers projects to denote the next major phase in mobile telecommunication standards beyond the 4G/IMT-Advanced standards. The term 5G is not officially used in any specification or office document yet made public by telecommunication companies or standardization bodies such as 3GPP, WiMAX Foru ITU-R.
New standards beyond 4G are currently being developed by standardization bodies,but they are at this time seen as under the 4G umbrella, not for a new mobile generation. Deloitte is predicting a collapse in wireless performance to come as soon as 2016, as more devices using
more and more services compete for limited bandwidth for their operation.[71]