From Brick Phones to Smartphones

On 3 April 1973 Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first public call from a handheld mobile phone on a New York street, calling a rival at Bell Labs. The first commercial cellular network opened in Tokyo in 1979, and in 1983 Motorola's DynaTAC 8000X went on sale in the United States for $3,995. Digital networks followed: the first GSM call was made in Finland in 1991, and the first text message, 'Merry Christmas', was sent in Britain in December 1992.

Phones became smaller and cheaper. In January 2007 Apple announced the iPhone, combining a phone, internet browser and music player with a touchscreen, and Google's Android system appeared on phones in 2008. App stores turned phones into platforms for countless services. Smartphones put cameras, maps and the internet in billions of pockets, changing work, social life and politics.