The mobile phone was born forty years ago as a hulk weighing almost one kilo . But over time it has been stylizing and evolving to become a sheet of glass, silicon and aluminum, a true pocket computer that also serves to talk.
The era of smart phones or smartphones – the one that made the billionth was sold in 2012 – has opened a new universe of applications and connectivity that is changing from the way we communicate to the economy. In fact, the number of mobile lines is equivalent to 85% of the Earth’s inhabitants and in developed countries it exceeds 100%, as there are users who have several of them. Thus, in 2013, in Spain there were more than 52 million.
On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer, made the first call with a mobile phone , a brick of 800 grams and 30 minutes of battery life. With him he called his rival from Bell Labs Research. Ten years later, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, the result of Cooper’s pioneering work, became the first mobile to be marketed: it cost $ 3,995 and took 10 hours to recharge.
But the real revolution in this field would come at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. In 1999, Bluetooth was introduced to the market, the standard for short-distance wireless communication that gave way to the hands-free whose name and symbol allude to Harald Blåtand –Bluetooth–, the Scandinavian king of the 10th century. That same year, the Benefon Esc !, a mobile with GPS that would inaugurate the era of geolocation for these devices. It was mostly sold in Europe. Similarly, the likely extinction of compact cameras began very soon after, the day the Samsung SCH-V200, the first mobile with a digital camera, was announced .
However, in 2003, the Nokia 1100, which did not have it, but was cheap and easy to use, was the most popular in the world. 250 million of them were sold until 2007, the year Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and changed everything . That all-touch, internet- and app-centric phone reinvented the concept of mobile and set the rest of the industry frantically imitating it.
A more or less direct consequence was the launch of Google Wallet in 2011, a virtual wallet that accepts any credit and debit card and works like these. Today, while 4G coverage is expanding, the technology that allows data transfers ten times faster, Samsung and Apple account for more than 50% of the smartphone market.
