Introduction: Imagine you're on vacation in a city you've never visited before. You might need a map to find your way around. You might also want to look up information about interesting places to visit. Where are the best restaurants? Where can you find interesting stores to buy souvenirs for your friends back home? Maybe you'd like to tickets to a play or take a photo of a famous landmark. Today, You can do all of these things by simply pulling out your smartphone and opening the right app. This was'nt always the case, through. Originally, mobile devices could do little more than make telephone calls. Modern smartphones are powerful handheld computers. They can do almost anything an app developer can dream up!
Table of Contents
- First Things First
- Over The Air
- Phones On The Go.
- Pocket Size.
- Getting Smarter.
- Cutting the Cord.
- Simple Simon
- Expanded Options For Simple Simon.
- Ahead Of Its Time.
- The BlackBerry Boom.
PUTTING COMPUTERS TO WORK
click the word computer to know more about this point
First things First
Today, a mobile phone can instantly connect you with someone halfway around the world at the touch of a button, no matter where you are. You can text, send an e-mail, video chat, or use a number of other options. But communication possibilities have not always been so numerous. The first telephone was invented in 1876. For almost 100 years afterward, telephones could only connect to communications networks through wires.
Over the Air
In 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper and his fellow researches had discovered a way to send telephone signals using radio waves. With a phone that weighed roughly 2 pounds(0.9 Kilogram), Cooper demonstrated the new wireless technology to a group of reporters. He did so by making a call to a rival inventor at Bell labs to announce Motorola's victory in the race to build the first mobile phone. The Press was amazed by the new technology, but it was not until the 1980s that portable wireless phones were introduced to the public.
Phones on the go
The first commercially available portable cellular phone, Motorola's DynaTAC 8000x, Went on sale in 1984. It was extremely large and heavy compred to modern cell phones. It was also very expensive, with a price tag of almost $4000. Users could do little more than make basic telephone calls with the device. Because of their size and expense, the DynaTAC s and other early cell phones were mainly used by travelling business people, who carried them in their briefcases.
Pocket Size
Over time, mobile phones became smaller and more affordable, making them more appealing for everyday use. In 1996, Motorola introduced the first "flip phone". This design allowed the phone to fold in half, making it easy to fit into a pocket or purse. Two years later, Nokia released the first mobile phone with out an antenna sticking out of the top. This meant cell phones took up even less space, making them more portable.
Getting smarter
In the 1990s, computer companies vegan selling hand-held devices called personal digital assistants, or PDAs. Early PDAs were equipped with simple, one-color touch screens and apps such as an address book, a calendar, and a notepad. Most people who used them were business people who needed to access scheduling and contact information on the go.
Over times, PDAs became more powerful, adding features such as full-color graphics and more sensitive touch screens. Software developers took advantage of these features to create more apps using mobile operating system such as Palm OS and Microsoft Windows CE. By the late 1990s, PDA owners could use their devices to play music and video files, browse and edit documents, and even take digital photos using built-in cameras. More and more people were starting to see the appeal of handheld computers.
Cutting the cord
Connecting to the internet is an important part of the majority of today's most popular mobile apps. Like making a telephone call, getting online once required access to wired network. But in the 1990s, mobile phones and PDAs began using cellular networks to provide limited internet access on the go.
One of the first successful handheld devices to offer wireless internet service was the Palm VII. For a monthly fee, users could send and receive e-mail and access simplified versions of several popular web sites through built-in apps. While users could not access full web pages or download files, they could look up information such as sports scores, weather forecasts, or stock prices even when they were away from their desks. This was still a far cry from the powerful e-mail and web browser apps of modern devices, but it was a major step forward.
Simple Simon
In 1992, engineers front he computer manufacturer IBM unveiled a new mobile device at a computer show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Like a PDA, this is unique device was also a cellular phone. Called Simon, it was the world's first smartphone.
The first phone apps
Much like a modern smartphone, the Simon has a home screen with a number of icons to represent different apps. Touching an icon would open the app. The device's built-in programs included a calendar, a to-do list, and even a simple game called Scramble.
Expanded options
The Simon could not simply connect to the Internet and download new apps the way a modern smartphone can. Instead, it was equipped with an expansion slot. Users could plug in cards containing new apps, such as a music player or basic accounting software. The expansion slot could also be used to connect additional hardware, such as a digital camera.
Ahead of its time
With a battery life less than an hour and a price of around $900, the Simon was not a practical device for most users. As a result, it didn't quite take off as the next big thing. It was available for around six months. Roughly 50,000 Simon's were sold during this time, which is insignificant compared to the millions of smartphones sold in the same amount of time today.
However, many of this remarkable forward-thinking device's features and apps would come to be a standard part of mobile phones years later.
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The BlackBerry Boom
In 2002, the Canadian company Research In Motion released the BlackBerry 5810, the latest in its Blackberry line of PDA's. Like previous Blackberry devices, it featured a small keyboard for typing messages, a number of built-in apps, and wireless Internet access. However, unlike other PDAs, it also allowed users to make telephone calls. The combination of these features made it one of the first modern smartphones. The BlackBerry 5810 was an immediate success. Like similar devices, it was aimed mainly at business people at first. However, it soon began to catch among the general public, who enjoyed being able to stay connected to the Internet wherever they went.
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