The History of Smartphones: Part 1

I have an iPhone for okay, so iPhone for one of the very popular models out there. I actually have an iPhone four as well, though I use mine as an iPod touch because it's a hand me down. My wife has an iPhone five. She loves it. She and Syrie have nice long conversations of which I get to take no part. But I also do have my own legitimate smartphone, legitimate and that it's actually connected to a

cellular network, because my phone is not. I have an Android phone HTCG two to be precise, which was the successor to the HTCG one that'll come in handy later. But uh I was a late adopter to the smartphone UH model, as first by late adopter. Yes, do you mean before two eleven, because because that's when I adopted the smartphone. Yeah. Yeah, And as we'll see, that was that was fairly late, uh, considering when smartphones first started to hit the market. But then I was also a

late adopter to cell phones in general. I was one of those curmudgeons who said, why would I need a phone so people can get in touch with me whenever? That's what answering machines are for. Uh, because get off my lawn. But I thought we'd talk about the history, and also we need to kind of define what a smartphone is in general, because that's changed over time a

whole bunch, that's right. These these days, I think it's basically defined as um, something that has apps that you can download so that you can change what software is on your phone personally. Yeah, exactly, very true. And in the past that was it was more just kind of a combination of a cellphone and p d A at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, some basic features that made it more than just a device that could let you call on the go, but let you send messages in

various ways or or even serve the web. So a lot of the stuff that we would we would think of as a feature phone was originally what we would call a smartphone, because a feature phone now is pretty much anything that's not a smartphone, apart from, you know,

a brick that makes calls. But to really understand how smartphones evolved, um, well, we started talking about the history of it, and we realized that we kind of had to go a little further back than smartphones or cell phones or telephones because but essentially a smartphone is is it is a telephone that is mobile, and what what a mobile telephone is is technically a radio. Um, so you go all the way back to what was six Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah, that's alex as I like to

call him. Yeah, he came up with this idea. He called it the electrical speech machine, and uh in eighteen seventy six. And before him, there had been a lot of work in physics for discovering things like the nature of electromagnetism and how that could create certain waves, and there was a there had also been development of a thing called the telegraph, which was I know, nuts, right, but I can send messages across distance, yeah, exactly, and you don't have to use a horse or smoke or

a horse that's smoking. It's awesome. So yeah, the the at this point we're talking about actually transmitting voice over electricity, which was a phenomenal idea. And uh, the nice thing about this is that you're looking at these different disciplines that kind of combined to say, you know, there's probably the potential to make a wireless communications system. We've figured out how to do it by wire. We've got this other work that physicists are doing in electromagnetism and radio waves.

I bet that we can figure out this this relationship between electricity voice electromagnetism, make it work in some crazy way to transmit voice across great distances without wires. And there are a few people who are thinking of crazy thoughts like that. Uh Marconi, he was one of them. Kind of big, yeah, kind of big. There was the internet Darling Tesla. Yeah yeah, when you say his name,

doves fly out of the internet. Uh yeah. While he did make some amazing discoveries and was a phenomenal physicist in his day, also was a crazy, crazy man. He is his his picture is looking at us from the podcast wall right now, staring staring deeply into me and judging me. That might also be my I get a little grouchy with Tesla. Edison also very important during this time up by the way, that's your queue taboo. You cheer Tesla and you boo Edison. That how the internet works. Well,

he killed elephants. He did kill elephants. That's true. He used alternating current to shock elephants to death. But we're kind of getting off base anyway. At this point, we're talking about radio. So now radio, of course plays an important part because when you get to the point of cellular telephones, you're really talking about another version of radio communication. So you've got the the development of the telephone and

the development of radio all going on at the same time. Uh. And then we'll skip ahead a little bit because although there are lots and lots of things we can talk about during this time, ultimately they don't really uh inform our discussion about the history of the smartphone. I would go all the way to oh, I'm I'm actually not familiar with this, with this particular reference that ves wireless even wireless. Okay, so there's actually a clip online where

you can watch this silent film. And I did not know about this until this morning. So I don't think that I'm brilliant because I put this in our notes. I just found out about it a thought it was too cool to pass up because I was looking around and someone jokingly referred to it as the first smartphone. It's a silent film that shows two women walking down the street having a conversation, or at least that's what we assume they're doing, because we can't hear them. They

could be making bird noises for all I know. They come up to a fire hydrant, and as two women in the early twentieth century would do, they stop at the fire hydrant. Clearly, of course, they wrap a wire around the end of the fire hydrant and they and the other end of that wires holds up to a radio. And then there's another wire from the radio going to an umbrella, which one of the two ladies opens up and holds up into the air. And then they fiddle with some knobs on the radio that is now wired

to both the umbrella and the fire hydranydrant. And then it cuts with the magic of cinema to a radio operator who is holding up a transmitter to a phonograph and plays music from the phonograph through the radio transmitter, which the two ladies on the street are apparently listening to the umbrella. And yes, yes, so this was this was what people were calling the first smartphone because it

was using wireless radio technology to transmit communications exactly. I like to think of it as the first iPod commercial. But yeah, that's why I put that in there, because someone jokingly referred to it as the first smartphone, which really it only had one way communication. You can only receive. There was not a transmitter, right, they didn't have a microphone waked up to it exactly. Certainly that was going to be in the sequel. Yes, yes, it was Eve's

Witness to the Reckoning. Um did not yet did not do well the box office, sadly. That's why I had to put that in there, just because the clip is online, and I'll share a clip of that in our Facebook page so you guys can get a look at it because it's it's entertaining, It sounds spectacular. If this were not audio, then I would want to play it right now. Uh no, But but we we had some actual mobile

call technology going on by the correct that's correct. You got a T and T and bell Labs now Bell Labs, is the research and development arm of a T and T correct and Bell Labs very much known for developments in wireless communication as well just communication technology in general. So in the nineteen forties they developed the first wireless network, and that's kind of being generous, Uh what was it?

What was it like? Back in so imagine that you are in a big metropolis and your big metropolis has a wireless network that consists of a single tower with a transmitter on it, and that transmitter is capable of handling oh maybe a dozen channels of communication, so that's

all it could handle at one time. So in other words, even if you had a lot of people with the handsets, you could have of them actually operated simultaneous or maybe even just six because I don't know if it was too like it was two ways, but I honestly don't know because I didn't have enough information there. But but the the first wireless call was made by a truck driver, showing that even back in the nineteen forties we were not practicing safe driving techniques. And it was a hand

set like like a rotary phone. Hands do you know what a rotary phone is? Lauren? I remember rotary phones from when I was about three. Lauren's a little younger than I am, so, so the rotary phone handle, it's this giant handle, right, and it's got like a cord that goes down to the base unit of this wireless telephone. And how how large was the based unit of a

wireless telephone? Well, I don't have the specific dimensions, but I can tell you it weighed eighty pounds and for our friends who used the metric systems, thirty six point three kilograms. So not exactly fit in your pocket mobile, not so much something that you want to want to take around with you, you know, I mean vacations. I assume it's camera was really crappy, Yeah, terrible. Yeah, yeah,

a zero megapixel camera, right. Yeah. The only app could I could run is call this person, and that's only if you dialed it. Um. Yeah, eighty pounds. Yeah. If Steve Jobs had come out in two thousand and seven and unveiled the iPhone and it weighed eighty pounds, I doubt it would have done quite so well on the market. Yeah,

not so much, but for those purposes. Yeah, and it cost fifteen dollars a month to have the service which if you were to do an inflation calculator as I did, which had the latest year as eleven, that's the most recent figure, but in the fifteen dollars a month would be a hundred thirty eight dollars a month, which which actually, yeah, that I would take that today. Yeah, that's actually lower

than what I'm paying. Although although I suppose that, yeah, that that that eighty pounds of lugging equipment around is maybe well, I would also be in better shape. I wouldn't need to download any physical fitness apps to my phone, because just carrying the phone would be physical fitness. Maybe maybe we need to bring back the eighty pound phones. Maybe maybe this is this will solve the oats any traffic.

If any of our listeners out there launch a company where you market an eighty pound smartphone, we demand at least some sort of residuals because we ain't getting rich from podcasts and folks. Also a prototype send one over. Yeah okay, So moving on, we get to nine. Now this is where we start seeing companies look into developing cellular networks. So going beyond that single transmitter model I was just talking about. Now we're looking at building the

foundation that would allow people to make sell calls. Right, and by cellular, of course, we mean a telephone that can go through a network of towers and keep the signal exactly, yes, because that's a that would be an issue. If you were to move outside the broadcast range of a transmitter and a receiver, then you would drop your call. So if you have a network of these transmitters and receivers, then the theoretically you can move from one to the other and you'd be fine, but you'd have to figure

out how to coordinate. Yeah, you gotta you gotta build the architecture so that the phone when it moves from one to the other, gets handed off from one tower to another tower, or a communication ceases. This is not a trivial problem, and it will take many decades of work and and lots of infrastructure goes into it. And uh yeah, and so so even though we technically had the capacity to make these calls, to make these mobile calls back in the nineties, we would not have the

infrastructure to do so. I mean, I mean, I guess it started in right, Yeah, No, you're exactly right. Even today, I mean, certain parts of Atlanta we drive through and I'm just like you can you gehit that dead section? There's a section on okay, And I apologize to all the people who are going to hear the pronunciation of this street, but this is how we say it in Atlanta. Ponstall le in when you go downstall. I'm sorry, it's not pomps Own, which is what how my wife pronounces it,

being from Philadelphia, she refuses to sleep in Florida. Yeah, they can't. I'm a little bit physically incapable of saying it. After after about eight years, I worked it out. It's it's tough, but yeah, there are certain dead sections. Clearly, we still have to keep building those networks out if we want to have universal coverage across the United States. Um, that sounds weird. Universal coverage across the United States Universal

if it's universal, doesn't make it international anyway. Moving on, so, so, yeah, we're talking decades of work to build out the cellular networks, which at the at that time, you know, no one was using because there was there wasn't nothing networks, right, it was physically impossible to crazy, Yeah, and it wasn't. It wasn't in fact until the nineteen seventies that they managed to pull off that first cellular call. It was yeah, Martin Cooper. Okay, so this is a great, great story.

Martin Cooper and executive with Motorola. Are you imagine this? You head up a research and development facility within Motorola. Sure, okay. You know that you have uh uh peers in the industry who are working on cellular networks at the same time that your group is working on them. Yes, the big one being Bell Labs of a T and T. You and your team managed to make a cellular network and a phone that will work on that network, and you can make a call to anyone. Who is the

first person you call? My mom? I'm not sure. Well, Martin Cooper decided to call the head of the research and development team over at Bell Laboratories because the very first cell phone call was a crank call. That is amazing. Isn't that phenomenal? How many more cell phone calls would follow in that wake? Did he ask if his refrigerator

wasning Prince Albert in a can? Actually I don't think he did any of that, but but yes, the famously, he very cheekily made a phone call to the two executive over at Bell Labs which was kind of tweaking their nose at the same time as having this historic moment on that phone was also a little a little clunky. It was not eighty pounds, but it was about one point seven five pounds, which is around point eight krams.

And it had a cute nickname Brick, which you know, obviously, if if I saw a phone marketed as the Brick, I'm just thinking, boy, I gotta get my hands on that thing. Oh yeah, oh yeah, the eyebricks. Canna get the lead weight too, that would be awesome. So but this this obviously showed a shift in telephone technology. It would still be quite a few years before cell phones became a common thing in the consumer market, but we started to see them get adopted for advanced users, for

business users probably yep. We also those first adopters, those early adopters who would like to be on the bleeding edge of technology before it's even proven. They would go out and get one. They were really expensive, they were not very um practical, but this was the beginning of that that trend. Um. Now, the next thing I have here is nineteen seventy four, and uh, ladies and gentlemen

of Greek ancestry. I would like to apologize profusely for what I am about to attempt, because nineteen seventy four was when Theodore George and here we go, Paris Cavacos, that's my best guest. Paris Scovaco said, it's a Greek name, so obviously I probably have butchered it. But he patented a concept. Uh he actually he submitted the patent in nineteen seventy two, but in seventy four he was granted the patent for a concept for what would be a or an early smartphone, and I wasn't called that at

the time. Of course, it was called an apparatus for generating and transmitting digital information. Smartphone is catchier. I see, I see why that one stuck. Although I would say, Lauren, you you're familiar somewhat with the the realm of the steampunk a little bit, I would think that steampunk fans what they really need to do is just go through and look at patent titles, because every patent title is really more of a description of what the device does.

And if you've ever seen anyone who creates steampunk gadgets, that's almost always what they name their stuff. It's not a simple name. It's a descriptor. It's as many words as you can possibly fit into a single phrase without losing your breath and falling over. And the word ether has to be in there somewhere. Well clearly, yeah, I mean obviously it's the most important part. Also, don't forget

your goggles. Uh, that's neither here nor there. Moving on, so so so in in seventy four, um um, our friend, our friend Teddy. Yeah I like that. Yes, Teddy put in this patent um and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing with it. Is that correct? Well? Yeah, I mean it kind of just sort of languished because while the concept was there, the technology wasn't really up to task

to fulfilling on that promise. Because the idea was to have this handheld device that could transmit digital information at the time in the in the handheld device would not really be able to do that efficiently. We're talking about I mean, we were in nineteen seventy four. I'm again, you would be more familiar with this because you were ancient. Um, but I was not born in seventy four. Thank you, I don't have to wait a year. But yes, yes, hand handheld devices at the time could could do not

very calculating. We had some, We had some We had some really good graphics calculators first starting around the around the seventies. Yeah, Hewett Packard had some some calculators and IBM of you as well. But they were more than the size of our laptops. They were closer to that than a than a slider phone, definitely. And in nineteen seventy four, you're also talking about this is this is right at the very bleeding edge of the personal computer.

Are so a smartphone, which in a way is like a a a distant cousin of the PC that fits in your hand. Clearly, it would be unreasonable to think of something like that existing in seventy four when the actual PC still itself was not much, not really a thing. Yet you have to wait another couple of years for those to become a thing. So when when did when did? Um?

I mean because one of the ancestors of smartphones had to have been p D a Personal Digital assistance which which came onto the scene in the early eighties, Is that correct? So there's this company called Scion, and that's going to become important in a little bit too. Ssion created this device called the organizer. Now, the first organizer was more of a curiosity. It was part calculator, part

database manager, or part part like digital note taker. So imagine that you have a watch that also lets you type stuff in it, but you can't do anything else with the stuff, so you can make it just sits in the watch forever. Right, Yeah, you could delete it eventually.

I think they had to use Actually I don't think it's this one, but there is one p d A I read about where the only way to reformat it was to bathe it an ultra violet radiation, which, of course, I mean I have one of those devices at home. So yeah, the dogs love it. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, they hate it. So yeah, the the organizer, all it was was a clock in this a way of taking notes.

But you couldn't you couldn't organize it in any other way. Really, it was like you could put I could put down your name and your phone number, and then under on the next line under I might put eggs, milk, bread, you know, et cetera. And then on the next line down I might say, um, you know, write down what a person's address, And there's there's no rhyme or reason.

There wasn't there was no particular operating system, right. But one just two years later they introduced the organizer too, and that one was really the very first pd eight had a lot more features that actually had allowed you to organize stuff into different categories, and it laid the groundwork for what the p d A would be over the next really the next decade and a half. P d a's, I mean they technically still exist, but mostly

they've been co opted by smartphones. It's one of those many things that we have replaced in our pockets with a single We went from so we went from seventy four to eight four. What's our next jump? I think our next jump is all the way to ninety four. Yeah, we'd like to take these decades people. Um, And that was that was when that was the first time that that a p d A and a cell phone really got got kind of smooshed together. Right, Yeah, So what

IBM dead? It was IBM IBM took a PDA and they took a cell phone, and they put them in a room together and put on some very white music. And about nine months later, the Simon Personal Communicator came out and that's how smartphones are born. Actually that's mostly a lie, but no, they did. They did come up with a product called the Simon Personal Communicator, and yeah, it was part cell phone, part p d A. So in a way it's the kind of like the great

grandfather of smartphones. And it could send facsimiles. Is that correct, Verry? What wasn't that one of the first messages that it sent.

I believe during one of their their stage shows they sent a facts from one end of the stage to the other and we're like, check us out you yeah, which is at that time that was pretty exciting certainly, and you know, it's it's hard for us to remember now, but for all, remember all those you know, all those hoax emails or jokes you would get an email and then later on you would start getting them on things like Facebook. My very dear grandmother still still uses email

to send them. Yeah, so you get those forwards. Back in the day, which was a Thursday, remember, uh, we used to send those via facts. They're called facts lure. Facts Laura is a type of folklore where the same sort of hoaxes and jokes would get passed around on

facts as they do today. On email or through social networks, and so very important to allow people to pass on that message that Bill Gates will give them lots of money if they forward this message on which it's not true critical but but yeah, and it was, it was, I mean relatively tremendously expensive at the time, the sign and um, it was it cost it cost a thousand ninety nine dollars um by itself or a contract because even then even then didn't when they're working with Bill

cell I think, um they had teamed up with Bell Seal to do this. Who wasn't entirely sure about this whole cell phone thing quite at that moment, the smartphone, right, Yeah, I mean it was. It was a big risk at that time. And even at that price, they still sold, they still sold quite a few, uh products. Now granted again these were going to very you know, a very specialized market because not everyone could afford a well in to day's dollars would be nearly more than sixteen hundred

dollars for a phone. Sixteen hundred dollars for a phone for a phone. Yeah, but if you which is twice what I would pay for anyone contract, And of course I guess we should take this moment to also acknowledge the fact to all of our listeners overseas who are used to buying your phones without any subsidies from your cell phone carrier. We totally understand the you you pay

more perfone than we do. But we're coming at it from the perspective of people in the United States who sign away two years of our lives in order to be able to buy a phone for about four dollars cheaper than what it would go for otherwise. We we have to make a blood OAF but it only costs about two hundred dollars to the phone, and somehow it works out. Yeah, there's there's usually some sort of weird ceremony involved, but two guys over there don't need to

know all about that. We don't want to give away all our secrets. But so, but so, the Simon, the Simon Personal Communicator, really I kind of didn't do well. I don't think it was it was a few thousand, but you know, it was like it was tet and it was kind of a prototype. And and again the infrastructure was not prepared to handle something like that. There

weren't that many places that you could use it. Yeah, and and for for something that was based on a concept of you can use this anywhere that wasn't really it was it was, and so I think it was off the market. It was. It was definitely one of more of a proof of concept. That's why it turned out.

It turned out to be more of a proof of concept that it turned out to be a useful product on and so one because of those very things you say, because yeah, I mean if if your whole thing is this is mobile, then you better be able to use it MOBI. Yeah. Apart from like it's mobile, as long as you stay within this four square foot area of this part of the office that's adjacent to this giant window,

that's not terribly useful. No no, um. But But but very soon after that, in nineties six, Palms started Yeah Palm, man boy, what a And we've done an episode about Palm, a couple of episodes about Palm and including it's a relationship with other companies. But in ninety six that's when it started to really make a name for itself in the personal Digital assistant UH market. And they released the Pilot one thousand and Pilot five thousand, and people who owned Palm p D as are some of the most

passionate technology lovers I know, oh absolutely. I mean there I know people who still will talk about either their PDA or their Palm. Smartphones, like the Trio owners are like, well, they're like a mega owners. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that they are really passionate about that product. Right, Yes, absolutely, and it's

it's easy to see why. I mean it was. It was very exciting at the time that the level of functionality that they were getting out of out of a thing that you could put in your pocket and carry around with you and have have access to um all sorts of stuff. Man, I mean you could have all your calendar in there, you could have files, you could even run apps on these things. It was. It was

a small, portable, very limited computer. Yes, go just another year and then you know, there's this company that pops up in n called HTC. Now I'm going to tell you a story here, Lauren. You guys out there you can listen in if you like HTC. I had never heard of HTC because I was not into smartphones at all until I got until first, and so I didn't that's actually right. It came out in two thousand eight, but I didn't buy my until two thousand nine. So

that's really remarkable that you knew that that Lauren's been stalking. Anyway, I've been listening to your other podcasts. You've talked about this before, Jonathan. Fair enough, fair enough, So HTC. I had never heard of them. I didn't realize that they had. They were first founded, and in fact, they've had a much longer association with smartphones than I was aware. When I saw the g One, I naively thought, oh, this must be like one of their first products, because I've

never heard of them before. Now that was due to my ignorance, not due to HTC's UH success in the the or lack thereof in in UH in the market. In fact, we'll talk a little bit about some of their other products in a in a bit. So, yeah, HTC pops up on the scene and they become a big name, although not they don't always have a smooth sailing kind of relationship with the market either. HTC has been having some issues over the last couple of years.

In fact, most most technology companies, I think are doing a tiny bit of that here and there. You found out the first use of the term smartphone. Yes. Um, that also happened in it was attached to one of Ericsson's phones, UM called the g S eight eight a k a. The Penelope. Oh it's not Penelope, not Penalope. Man, I've been saying it wrong all these years. Um, but yeah, this this was this was basically a concept model. I

think only about two were ever produced. But um, but yes, that was the first marketing package that had the word smart and phone in conjunction. There was a space between them, so clearly there was a lot of work to be done in the marketing field. Deleting that space would take two years, two years of hard work. You thought building that cellular network was tough. Space is big yo, getting rid of it. But yeah, yeah, and and and this is this is where that the rest of our outline

is extremely crunched together. It's it's if I drew a little picture and had to start making bendylines going all over the place. Well, yeah, because up to now we've been jumping like we were doing. We were doing fifty year jumps for a while, then we got down to ten year jumps. Now we're doing like two and pretty soon we've got a whole bunch of stuff happening year by year, year by year, a month by month. So, Lauren, it turns out we had a lot to say about

the history of smartphones. We talk a lot. Yeah, So it turned out to be so long that we're doing something that it's not unusual for text stuff. We're splitting it into two episodes, so we're gonna leave off here, but we'll pick up in our next episode right where we left off. If you guys have topics you would like us to tackle on tech stuff, email us our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com or contact us

on Facebook or Twitter. Are handle us tech stuff, hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is its staff works dot com.