One Phone

In the very early days of the mobile space handsets weren’t designed with consumers in mind. You’d need a couple of thousand pounds to get hold of one, and even then performance wasn’t great. Back then, mobile phones were designed with the likes of Gordon Gecko in mind, businessmen-types that drove big Jags and flew Concord. Not your average Joe.

The world’s first mobile phone call was made on April 3, 1973, when Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, called a rival telecommunications company and informed them he was speaking via a mobile phone. The phone Cooper used – if you could call it that – weighed a staggering 1.1kg and measured in at 228.6x127x44.4mm. With this prototype device, you got 30 minutes of talk-time and it took around 10 hours to charge.

But what were the phones that made it happen? How did we get from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 5s (the world’s first 64-bit smartphone)? Who were the pioneering brands that made today’s handsets possible? And which phone, out of the thousands launched since the 1980s, was the most important? Answer: quite a few.