Editor’s Note: Welcome to our coverage of 25 years in wireless. RCR Wireless News is celebrating with a package of stories detailing the advances of the past three decades. For full coverage please visit RCRWireless.com/25years.
People of a certain age will remember the Wayback Machine engineered by Mr. Peabody and his sidekick, Sherman, featured in “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” of the 1960s.
Those of you who cannot recall the Wayback Machine should fire up your mobile browsers and find out how your youth has robbed you of critical cultural knowledge.
In any case, we’re cranking up the dusty Wayback Machine for a pinball-like trajectory through the past 25 years of cellphones.
Warning: the Wayback Machine has not been well-maintained since Mr. Peabody created it, thus our journey is but a kaleidoscopic flash through history to provide context for today’s device offerings. And it flies primarily through American time/space continuums. Should this rickety ride omit a visit to your or your company’s ground-breaking work, somewhere out there, Mr. Peabody is standing by to take your call. (Or you can comment on this story and fill in the gaps. We’d be much obliged for your help.) On that note, we pause to pay tribute to OKI, which contracted with Bell Labs to develop cellular phones in 1975, and which delivered the first call at Soldier Field, and was named one of the “Products of the Year” by Fortune Magazine in 1983.
The future is here
In 25 years, we’ve emerged from the laboratory to tote a succession of briefcases, bricks, candy bars, flip-phones and touchscreen devices. Now we hear tell of concepts such as “de-materialization” and embedding connectivity in our homes and appliances.
We’ve gone from a cautious, experimental exchange of “hellos” to surfing the Web, texting and swapping photos on the fly. Nostalgia even makes a market: a company named Retro Brick, based in Hampshire, United Kingdom, locates and provides vintage handsets to people nuts enough to collect them or even use them on the street.
Technical advancements
Certainly, I tell my co-pilot, pricing through subsidies, innovative rate plans and the development of content has accelerated the handset’s popularity. Obviously, technology wars had consequences, too. But we’re talking hardware here.
On the technical side, the key concept is “smaller, faster, better, cheaper,” I said with growing confidence.
A revolution in components – particularly the size, speed and cost of semiconductors – propelled devices from ones that couldn’t be moved easily to sleek, handheld computers. At the other end of the spectrum, platform manufacturing – using one basic design that can be tweaked into various models to address various consumer segments – has brought economies of scale that have lowered prices and spread the handheld device across the globe.
My neat summary has sent my co-pilot into a deep slumber. I say “handset history, trends” into the voice-activated control panel and the Wayback Machine is shaking hard and we’re off.
Watch out, Mr. Peabody!
Out the Wayback Machine’s dim portal, you can just make out Martin Cooper, then-general manager of Motorola Inc.’s communications systems division, who placed the first public phone call on a portable cellular device on April 3, 1973.
Suddenly, Cooper is gone, it’s 1984 and Moto has brought out the first commercial handset, a one-pound DynaTAC phone costing $4,000. Battery life lasted an hour; recharging was a multi-hour practice. Then it’s 1990 and 1 million subscribers have signed up in the United States.
Moto’s StarTAC – the first real clamshell and this writer’s first handheld – is now visible; we must have reached 1996. The thin clamshell – arguably, the initial blend of technology and style – was born. The analog StarTACweighed a little over three ounces and could be set to vibrate. Later editions could send text messages.
The Wayback Machine is rattling hard, but I can see Nokia Corp.’s 6160 and 6162 digital handsets through the portal; they accompanied AT&T’s Digital One Rate plan in 1998, which took the guesswork out of cellphone bills at a critical time for consumer uptake.
There’s no time to talk “digital,” but a read-out said that it provides cost-effective capacity on the network and greater flexibility for handset functionality.
Hey! It’s Avi
This is crazy, but analyst Avi Greengart with Current Analysis just appeared in our control room. (We must be over New Jersey.) He said he could offer a little human perspective. Well, we’re belted in, go ahead.
“I divide cellphone history into three eras,” Greengart said. “No. 1 was your first phone. Most people weren’t sure they needed it and were concerned about their bill. They thought they’d leave it in their car and use it in emergencies. That didn’t happen.”
Greengart waved a Motorola Razr.
“The second era is when people realized that they’d carry their phone all the time and be seen with it,” Greengart continued. “It’s the most personal of consumer electronics devices that connects you with people. Style became critical.”
“The third era I call …”
Greengart is gone. Back to the portal.
Outside, analyst Ross Rubin with NPD Group is excitedly gesturing with both hands. First, he’s waving a Sanyo Corp. handset with a color screen, but I can’t see the model number.
“You don’t need color for phone numbers, obviously, so the color screen presaged adoption of rich media on mobile devices,” Rubin said, waving the Sanyo unit.
Then he waved what looked like a Treo 600from Handspring, which morphed into Palm Inc.
“This is one of the first viable smartphones, embraced by PDA users,” Rubin said. “It opened the door for more native applications to ride on the handset itself and that made it attractive to businesses.”
Now, a stream of devices are magically emerging from Rubin’s hands. They’ve got browsers on them and Web pages fill their color screens. Bluetooth and camera modules are on nearly all of them. Half sport Wi-Fi and GPS applications.
“In the past decade, we’ve gone from the Internet accommodating the cellphone to the cellphone accommodating the Internet,” he said, somewhat cryptically. Then he, too, is gone.
What’s Daniel doing here?
Daniel Longfield, analyst with Frost & Sullivan, is banging on the control room door. When we let him in, he’s got a Sidekick from Danger Inc. in one hand and a Research In Motion Ltd. BlackBerry in the other.
The Sidekick, he said, was the first in a line of smartphones targeted at consumers for e-mail, messaging and gaming. The BlackBerry’s model number is obscured (it’s crazy in this time/space continuum and we haven’t had lunch yet) but it offers voice services.
“I’m not sure if Nokia, RIM, Palm or someone else brought the first smartphone to market,” Longfield said. “But the clear winner in the early game was RIM, due to its end-to-end solution for handling secure e-mail.”
Longfield pointed out the portal to a nebula that contained a jillion devices.
And, dang it! Greengart is out there, again. He yelled something about the global context and Nokia’s role in selling seven out of 10 of all phones in emerging markets – a volume-based influence that can’t be ignored, he said.
We bring Greengart inside; it’s nasty out there and we want to hear more.
Software’s ascendance
Like any good analyst, Greengart is finishing his earlier point, before the Wayback Machine zagged badly.
“The third era I call the era of software design,” Greengart said. “This is when software ascends to the level of importance of hardware design. It’s not just about ease-of-use. Today I want to do something completely different with this device. I want Web browsing, new applications.”
Suddenly, Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) is at the portal, shouting about the iPhone.
Did he really shout “Include the iPhone or I’ll bury your miserable $#@!%,” or did I just imagine it? I’m not taking any chances and we lock the control room door.
Outside the portal, Sergey Brin appeared in rollerblades, posing with a microphone. Ohmygod! He intoned “G1 … G1 … G1” and it’s coming through the control room’s speaker system.
“Google has the power to shape the market to its advantage,” Greengart said coolly. “We don’t know yet what impact the G1 will have, but it’s something to watch.”
I double-lock the door. No taking chances with Apple and Google!
Bullwinkle h
imself was knocking on the portal when a roar and a flash threw me to the ground.
I came to in my office cubicle with a blank computer screen and another deadline looming.
How to capture 25 years of handset history? I muttered, as if waking from a dream. That’s one tough assignment.
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Moto made ‘quantum leap’ for iconic handsets
Motorola Inc.’s original concept for its first commercial cellphone – the $4,000 DynaTAC, launched in 1984 – was to take a wireline handset, cut off the cord and “make it go,” said Rudy Krolopp, who headed the DynaTAC design team.
But at that early stage, the Schaumburg, Ill.-based developer of the first handheld, cellular communications device struggled with the large size of components, bulky batteries and large antennas, Krolopp said.
In the procession of products that followed, from the DynaTAC to the MicroTAC to the StarTAC, Motorola needed to make “a quantum leap” of some kind, the designer said last week.
“We needed something that appealed to females, a sexy product,” Krolopp said.
That resulted in the push for thinness, a “wearable” handset that was small, light and tough – the prototype of nearly all handsets since then, including the vendor’s phenomenally successful Razr platform. (Today, the Razr V3 remains the top-selling handset in the United States, according to NPD Group.)
Krolopp said that in design school he learned a four-point approach to his work: define the challenge, design a product that can be manufactured profitably, make it tough, make it look good.
Krolopp’s instincts and education informed much of Motorola’s early successes in the business and when he retired as director of industrial design in 1997, he had spent 42 years with the company.
When the modern era arrived and the company worked on the Razr, it decided that CMF – colors, materials and finishes – would be a critical differentiator, said Jim Wicks, corporate VP in Moto’s Consumer Experience Design group. The Razr’s metal and glass case lent a perception of high quality and the handset began life as a premium product, before lower pricing took it to the mass market.
Acknowledging that the company over-relied on the Razr platform for too long, Wicks said that today, among Motorola’s 60-odd handsets produced each year, a handful are designed and marketed to reach for “hit” status, while the balance of the portfolio addresses a variety of market segments.
Asked whether the title of his group – Consumer Experience Design – reflected that hardware was taking a backseat to software and “experiences,” Wicks said:
“There’s still an object quality to devices that people love. But aspects of digital technology – software sensors, for instance – will inform the physical aspects of the device. In the next 10 years, we’ll evolve to take a multi-sensorial design approach. But even when you do that, Rudy’s points on design still apply. We just have new tools and contexts.” -Phil Carson
