The modern smartphone

The story

Phones with buttons

Until the early 2000s, a mobile phone was used mainly for making calls and sending text messages. In 1973 a Motorola engineer, Martin Cooper, had made the first call from a portable device, as big as a brick and weighing more than a kilo. Over time mobile phones became smaller and lighter: in the 1990s almost everyone wanted one, and brands such as Nokia and Motorola sold millions of them.

Someone had already tried to join the telephone with a small computer. In 1994 IBM had sold a device, the Simon, with a touch screen, an address book and a calendar. In the following years came Palm and BlackBerry devices, used by professionals to read email, usually with a small keyboard. They were useful, but complicated, with menus that were hard to learn, and a stylus or tiny keys for typing.

9 January 2007

On that day, in San Francisco, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, stepped onto the stage at a trade show. He said he was about to present three things: an iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary phone and a device for exploring the Internet. He repeated them several times, and at some point the audience realised it was a single object: the iPhone. It had no keyboard and no stylus. It had a 3.5-inch screen that you could touch with your fingers, even two at once, to enlarge a photo or scroll a page. It was “multi-touch”.

On sale in the United States from 29 June 2007, it cost $499 at first with a phone contract, and many people queued for hours outside the shops. It contained a phone, a music player, a camera, a browser for the Web and several sensors, including the accelerometer, which works out how the device is tilted. Time magazine chose it as invention of the year.

Apps and Android

The next step was the App Store, opened on 10 July 2008 with about five hundred programs: anyone could write an app and sell it or give it away to users. Since then smartphones have shared their success among games, maps, music, messages and countless other functions. Meanwhile Google had bought a small company called Android in 2005 and turned it into a free operating system for phones, offered to many different brands. The first Android phone came out in October 2008. Today Android and the iPhone's system, iOS, dominate the market.

In the following years came social networks, messaging such as WhatsApp (2009) and Instagram (2010), digital photography always in your pocket, GPS navigation and payments by phone. The smartphone has become the camera, the satnav, the alarm clock, the wallet, the book reader and the newspaper of many people.

A world in your pocket

In a few years the smartphone took the place of a great many objects: the compact camera, the music player, the road map, the torch, the voice recorder, the calculator and the alarm clock. Sales of digital cameras, for example, fell sharply after 2010, because the best photos were now taken with the phone that everyone already had in their pocket.

The success was very fast. Within a few years the smartphone reached billions of people, including those in countries where there had never been a computer in the home: for many, it was the first way of connecting to the Internet. Today there are more than six billion smartphone subscriptions in the world.