In pictures: How have mobile phones changed over the years?
- Published
The first mobile telephone call was made by Martin Cooper on 3 April 1973. Nicknamed 'the father of the cellphone', Martin made the first phone call to a rival company and later said that all he could hear was silence. But apparently that was because his rival wasn't happy he'd lost the race to make the first call so didn't say anything! He invented the Motorola DynaTac 8000X which you can see him holding - affectionately known as The Brick (I think you can see why). It launched in 1983 and was the first mobile phone that ordinary consumers could buy and use.
A mobile phone like this one from the 1980s would have cost around £2,500! Being so big and weighing as much as a small bag of sugar meant it could hardly fit in your pocket like phones can nowadays.
This bulky phone is the IBM Simon and is considered to be the world's first smartphone - even though the word smartphone wasn't used at the time! It was released in 1993 and had a black and white touchscreen.
At the turn of the century, Nokia released the iconic 3310. It was known for its durable design and long battery life, as well as for the game Snake.
And then came the Nokia 1100 in 2003 - at the time, it was the best-selling electrical gadget in history. Over 250 million devices were snapped up, beating the PlayStation 2 to the top spot.
Flip phones or 'clam shells' were very popular in the early 2000s, like this one here - the Motorola Razr V3.
Although not every version of their phones had one, Blackberries like this Blackberry Bold 9900 were best known for their 'QWERTY' keyboards, like those you'd get on your computer or laptop. They were very popular with businesses as they were one of the first brands of phones you could send emails from, but features such as their messaging service BBM meant the general public loved them too.
And finally, the one whose birthday we're celebrating - the iPhone! Released in 2007, it became known as the iPhone 2G, as Apple chose to run it on the slightly slower mobile phone network as opposed to 3G.
Mobile phone developers are always looking for ways to give customers what they want, and one thing companies have tried hard to do is make their smartphones waterproof. Companies like Sony have paved the way with this, and even though most still aren't 100% protected from water-based damage, there are lots of smartphones on the market now that you could drop down the loo and still use (only after a thorough clean, of course)!
These days, it seems like for some people, flip phones are coming back in fashion! But as you can see with the pictured Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, the twist now is that the whole screen flips or folds. You might be saving pocket money up for a long time if you want one though - models can cost around £1600.
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