Remember the day you got your first cell phone. It was like getting your drivers license. No longer were you tethered to a LAN line. You could now talk to your friends (or text) from wherever you wanted. You could contact people while sitting at a restaurant or while driving in a car. It was complete bliss! For this week’s “Old School Friday” post I want to hear what everyone’s first cell phone was. I don’t remember the model of my first cell phone, but I think it was a Sanyo that I got in 1998 and it had a scroll wheel on the side.
To pay homage to the iPhone 3G S I’m going to dedicate this weeks “Old School Fridays” to the original iPhone. You’re probably thinking to yourself, how could you consider the iPhone old school? Let me ask you, would you consider the original iPod old school at this point? I would say yes, in fact I would consider the original iPod a relic at this point. With Apple’s aggressive product launch we can most likely expect a new iPhone once or even twice a year.
If you still are using the original iPhone consider yourself old school. With so many iPhones sold I wonder what people are doing with their original iPhones? I suggest Apple setup a recycle program.
It was eight years ago when the ultra-slim Sanyo SCP-6000 hit Sprint store shelves. At the time this was one of the slimmest phones to hit the market. The phone measured only .39 inches think, or should I say thin. The metallic silver finish turned heads when people used the phone. I remember seeing the phone for the first time and how I was in awh of how thin the phone was. It was around this same time that rather bulky flip phones were the phones to have. So it was refreshing to see a cell phone manufacturer come out with a phone that was different then what everyone else was making. Here’s to the Sanyo SCP-6000 for pushing slim to the limit!
Ever wonder what the first movie was that featured a cell phone? Any guesses…….the first movie was the 1987 smash hit Wall Street staring Michael Douglas. Of course the phone that was used was “the brick”. The phone appeared in a number of scenes throughout the movie. Nowadays it’s hard to watch a movie that doesn’t have someone using a cell phone in it.
It was only a little of nine short years ago that all cell phones had antennas. That’s right, if you remember cell phones either had a fixed antenna or some had antennas that you could retracted into the phone. The problem with antennas on phones is that they 1) always seemed to get in the way 2) they had to be extended to receive phone calls.
All that changed when Nokia introduced the Nokia 3210. The 3210 was the first cell phone to have an internal antenna. No need to have an antenna sticking out of the phone or extending an antenna to receive a signal. The 3210 launched in 2009 with great fan fair. The phone sold over 160 million units which was a HUGE number at that time. We can all thank Nokia for their long lasting invention. Could you imagine having an antenna sticking out of your iPhone or Blackberry?
I think I read somewhere that overall people text more than they actually talk on their cell phones. This is no surprise to most of us. It can be a lot easier to shoot someone a text message than to go through the process of making a phone call, exchanging pleasantries and then eventually asking your question. As we’re doing all this texting you might wonder why text messages are limited to only 160 characters. Why can’t we write as much as we want?
The inventor of the text message is Friedhelm Hillebrand. Hillebrand was sitting at home one day, back in 1985, typing on his typewriter and noted that each sentence or thought ran about 160 characters. It just so happened that Hillebrand was the chairman of the nonvoice services committee within the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a group that sets standards for the majority of the global mobile market, he pushed forward the group’s plans in 1986. All cellular carriers and mobile phones, they decreed, must support the short messaging service (SMS).
It took some time for the agency t find a data pipeline to support text messaging, but when they found the lane text messaging officially arrived. At first texting had its limitations because it was cumbersome to write a message using a standard keypad. It wasn’t until T9 took hold that texting really took off. Now texting is here to stay and is even more popular than making phone calls.
So now you know, texting started as an idea born from a typewriter and an idea!
We all take for granted that just about every cell phone manufactured these days has Bluetooth capabilities. It wasn’t that long ago, 2000 to be exact, that cell phones were not Bluetooth enabled. The first cell phone to utilize Bluetooth was by cell phone manufacturer Ericsson (this is before they became Sony Ericsson). The phone was the T36. The T36 was a tri-band flip phone with WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). The T36 was first introduced at the CommunicAsia conference and took the audience by storm. The ability to connect wirelessly to other devices via Bluetooth technology was truly a game changer. Thank you Ericsson for this great invention!
For this weeks “Old School Fridays” post we’re going to take a look at the first cell phone commercial. The commercial was for the Centel. I love this commercial because not only does it highlight “the brick“, but it shows the original car phone. You know, the cell phone that was installed directly into your car. The commercial is great because it showcases the lack of mobility from a car phone to the mobility of a cellular phone. This one is a classic!
For today’s “Old School Fridays” post I’m going to do a short (and high-level) history lesson on Nokia. Nokia’s history is very interesting and not what you would think. Contrary to popular belief Nokia has not always been in the telecommunications industry. In fact Nokia was created in 1865 as a paper manufacturer in Finland. The name Nokia came from the name of the town in Finland where the paper mill was built. In 1910 Nokia moved into the rubber business makes galoshes and boots. It wasn’t until 1960 that Nokia entered the consumer electronics space. Over the next 30 years Nokia focused solely on consumer electronics, and in 1990 Nokia decided to focus solely on telecommunications. In 1992 Nokia created their first GSM cell phone, the Nokia 1011.
Today Nokia is one of the largest manufacturers of cell phones in the world. It’s amazing to think that one of the largest manufacturers of cell phones started off making paper and rubber boots. Who knows, maybe in a hundred years the largest manufacturer of cell phones could start as a water bottling company or fast food restaurant, you never know.
You guys didn’t think I would let Friday end without an “Old School Friday” post did you? This weeks Old School Friday post is all about the first text message. The first text message was a SMS text. In case you don’t know SMS stands for Short Message Service. SMS was initially created to send message, up to 160 characters in length, from one GSM phone to another.
The first SMS message ever sent was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992. Neil Papworth of the Sema Group used his personal to send a SMS message via his computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone who used a Orbitel 901 handset to receive the message. Can you guess what the first text message said? The first text message was a simple “Merry Christmas”. The first SMS typed on a GSM phone is claimed to have been sent by Riku Pihkonen, an engineering student at Nokia, in 1993. No word on what the message said. So remember, next time you send a tesxt message it all began back in 92′.
