Happy birthday, smartphones! The revolution turns a quarter of a century old
It all began with Nokia. Exactly 25 years ago, the Finnish company presented the first smartphone with Internet access. It changed the world.
As of today, 15 August 2021, a quarter of a century has passed since Nokia first introduced the 9000 Communicator with an LCD display to the public. The presumably indestructible brick of a flip phone from Finland was the first mobile device ever to be able to connect to the Internet. It required no accessories to do so. You could connect to the Internet just like that. It was a revolution.
So, it seems only fitting to celebrate the day. Happy birthday, smartphones!
Let's take a look at this slice of world history that has permanently changed our everyday lives.
The Nokia Communicator
The Nokia 9000 Communicator came in a box filled with odds and ends. Included was a charger with a 2 mm connector, a data cable connector and a floppy disk with «server software» for your PC. To install it, you had to open the DOS prompt and type «A:\SERVER».
Then there was the phone itself. It boasted a jaw-dropping 8 MB of internal memory; 4 MB for the operating system and applications, 2 MB for the user and 2 MB for programs. The internal phonebook had room for 200 entries, and the last 10 calls were stored. The replaceable battery lasted 35 hours; you could talk on the phone for up to three.
All of that was the norm at the time. What was really new was that you could flip open the Communicator just like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3. You could then turn the phone by 90 degrees and type on a physical QWERTY keyboard. But you could do more than write a simple SMS. You could send e-mails. Keeping in mind the screen’s 640×200 pixel resolution.
And so, the founding stone was laid. After all, if a mobile phone could access this new Internet thing wirelessly, what else was possible?
Along came iPhone
The Internet phone meandered along for a while. All it offered was e-mailing and the now long-outdated Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). WAP was never practical; it was slow and cumbersome. How could it be anything but that? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Internet as such was still finding itself.
Tucked away behind the limelight of the first colour displays and GPS on Nokia phones and the Blackberry keyboards, a company was growing: Apple.
The late Steve Jobs made mobile communications history with three words: «One more thing.» The iPhone killed all competition overnight. The iPhone 3GS had a 3.5-inch colour screen with a 320×480 pixel resolution. It sported 256 MB of RAM and up to 32 GB of internal memory.
Looking back in 2021, Steve Job’s line that «today, we are going to reinvent the phone» holds true. The iPhone defined the shape of smartphones to come – rectangular with rounded corners and a touchscreen – as well as the software model with its App Store.
In short: «There’s an app for that.»
And then the rest
Nokia kickstarted it, Apple revolutionised it, and the world has been under the spell of smartphones ever since. A spell that remains steadfast to this day. Today, we debate foldable phones (Samsung and its «bendable glass»), how much RAM is reasonable and how we miss the physical keyboard, after all.
Funnily enough, some unexpected topics persist. Discussions often centre not around the processor cores of the new Snapdragon or the megapixels of the latest camera, but the battery. Or about whether the new smartphone fits into your pocket.
Or – much to the annoyance of reviewers – whether it takes good selfies.
But the next boundary to break is not the battery. It’s also not how comfortable phones are to handle. The next revolution will be screen modularity – efficiency by virtue of having more screen real estate, be it for work or entertainment. The prerequisite hardware already exists. The Microsoft Surface Duo shows what can be done with two separate screens, while Samsung’s Z Fold3 relies on a single, bendable display. Oppo, meanwhile, plans to roll up the screen. And everyone is now hiding the camera behind the display.
It’s not yet clear which model will win the race and whether it will be as revolutionary as the iPhone was.
But one thing is certain: we’re in for one hell of a ride.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.