Paper on Electronics: The Evolution of Smartphones

            Smartphones are the centerpiece of today’s life, we use them out of boredom, to communicate with others, to look up useful information, and countless other daily activities; in fact, many people feel lost if they do not have access to their smartphones. Smartphones have made our daily lives much simpler and allowed us to do otherwise cumbersome tasks with a few touches on a screen, but we often forget life before smartphones. The evolution of what we know today as a smartphone can easily be traced back through the years, and it is quite clear how we have gotten to this point today by incorporating different pieces of technology, like the pager and PDA, into the apex of today’s technology.

            To understand were smartphones came from, we first have to understand how telephones first came to be. In 1753, Scottish scientists first theorized that you could transmit messages through electricity (Hur). This was an important theory that soon led to the invention and further development of an electric telegraph, which was able to send textual messages. After three decades of telegraph communication, a direct result of trying to improve the telegraph led to the invention of the telephone (Hur). The telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, was now able to send sounds through electric wires (Hur). Telephones required telephone lines that had to be constructed all over America, and a direct line was needed to be connected between each phone in order for the audio message to be sent and received. The only sort of mobility that could be experienced with phones for a majority of telephone history was the phone booth, which were placed in many public areas. Telephones started to become cordless in the !970’s, and they allowed for the base to be connected to the landline, while the actual phone was free of any chords (Hur). This idea of chord-less phones soon led to the invention of cellphones.

            A giant technological leap towards smartphones was made on April 3, 1973, when Motorola released the first cellphone that weighed 1.1 kg and got 30 minutes of talk time (Goodwin). It would take until the 1990’s for the cellphone to really become more portable, as well as becoming more available to the general public (Goodwin). While these phones more closely resembled the smartphones we know today, they lacked two important features: text messages and the ability to access the internet. The evolution and incorporation of text messages can be traced back to pagers, sometimes referred to as beepers, that were portable devices that used radio frequencies to receive text messages from a touch tone phone, or an email, that would then be displayed on the screen of the pager; however, the pager was not able to send messages, only receive them (Bellis). Finally, personal digital assistants (PDA) closed the gap of the deficiencies of the early cellphones. PDAs were developed in the early 1990’s, but soon developed the ability to store contact information, manage the user’s calendar, communicate by e-mail, access the internet, and handle documents (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica). While these PDAs sound more like modern day cellphones, some even having touch screens, but the key aspect that PDAs lacked was the ability to receive and send calls.

            Smartphones first began to appear in the early 2000’s in the form of the T-Mobile “Sidekick” and by the mid 2000’s the BlackBerry soon became a must-have phone for all businesspeople (Pothitos). The BlackBerry was a significant bound towards the smartphones we know today because it incorporated texting, calling, the ability to send emails, and organize daily activities. The Apple “IPhone 3G” first hit the market in 2008, marking the beginning of the smartphones we know and love today, with the ability to download apps and browse the internet. Today’s smartphones feature all the things I grew up watching in sci-fi movies, like being able to video call friends, facial recognition, fingerprint recognition, and the ability to wirelessly charge your phone. The technology of smartphones has made giant technological leaps in the past decade alone, and I can not begin to imagine how they will advance in the future; possibly integrating holographic imaging to bring Face-timing to a whole new level.

Works Cited

Bellis, Mary. History of Pagers and Beepers. 19 April 2017. 12 October 2017. <https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-pagers-and-beepers-1992315>.

Goodwin, Richard. The History of Mobile Phones From 1973 To 2008: The Handsets That Made It All Happen. 06 March 2017. 12 October 2017. <http://www.knowyourmobile.com/nokia/nokia-3310/19848/history-mobile-phones-1973-2008-handsets-made-it-all-happen>.

Hur, Johnson. History of the Telephone. 2017. 12 October 2017. <https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-of-the-telephone/>.

Pothitos, Adam. The History of the Smartphone. 31 October 2016. 12 October 2017. <https://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2016/10/the-history-of-the-smartphone.html>.

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. PDA: HANDHELD COMPUTER. 17 December 2008. 12 October 2017. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/PDA>.