From clumsy ‘bricks’ to pocket-sized computers – Rory Cellan-Jones explores the rise of mobile phones through the years.
They’re the essential tools of modern living, the advanced computing devices we carry at all times – so why do I get all dewy-eyed about mobile phones? The thought struck me recently at the launch of the Mobile Phone Museum.
This online exhibition was promoted with an event in Soho, where partygoers could marvel at displays of handsets dating back to the 1980s, collected by the mobile analyst Ben Wood. The party echoed with cries of ‘Ooh I had that one!’ and ‘That was my first – it weighed a ton!’, as a wave of nostalgia washed over the prosecco-sipping crowd. For me, it brought back all sorts of memories.
Perhaps I’ve always found mobile phones so alluring because I was brought up in a home that didn’t even have a landline. My somewhat eccentric mother refused to have one in our flat, which meant trudging out to a nearby phone box if I wanted to make a call.
That made me all the more excited when in 1983, as a young BBC producer, I heard on the lunchtime news that Cellnet and Vodafone had been given licences to launch mobile phone networks. Wow, I thought, great news for millionaires, but I would never have a mobile phone.
The brick
But in 1987, by which time I was a reporter for the BBC in Cardiff, a correspondent from London came down for some big story. She pulled from her handbag the brick – the handset made famous by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street.
We local yokels stood slack-jawed with envy – some of us did have pagers or two-way radios in our cars, but imagine being able to make a call from anywhere! Eventually my wish came true and the BBC gave me a phone.
The mobile industry soon became my beat, and it was my professional duty as well as my personal pleasure to try out every new breakthrough. For years, most of those came from Nokia, the Finnish g ant whose handsets make up by far the biggest presence in Ben Wood’s collection.
From cameraphones to NFC
In 1999, I made my first trip to Nokia’s headquarters, overlooking a frozen lake outside Helsinki. There, I marvelled over the Communicator – a tiny computer you could put in your pocket – and was shown concept phones with colour screens.
The early 2000s proved especially exciting. I got my first BlackBerry, took terrible pictures with Nokia’s first cameraphone, and was part of a trial using NFC technology. Every month seemed to bring the launch of some groundbreaking device.
Unveiling the iPhone
It all culminated in January 2007 with the most dramatic product launch I’ve ever attended: Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPhone. Within a few years, Apple and then Google’s Android dominated the industry, with Nokia, BlackBerry and Windows Phone handsets vanishing into irrelevance.
This resulted in a loss of excitement. We now have what Ben Wood calls a ‘sea of sameness’: hugely impressive phones that are all rectangular glass slabs. Each year, I find it harder to stay awake during Apple’s iPhone event, longing for Tim Cook to ring the changes by proclaiming ‘This is the second best phone we ever made.’
Still, maybe 20 years from now, the mobile museum will have another exhibition, and visitors with smart contact lenses or brain implants will laugh at those clumsy devices you had to carry with you to stay connected.
Innovation comes in waves, and you can bet that even now some upstart company is designing a future that could make Apple and Android irrelevant.
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