Just as a Wright brother wasn’t the first person to fly - that was a New Zealander, Richard Pearse - the first mobile phone call wasn’t actually made by Martin Cooper on a Motorola portable cellular phone in New York in 1973.

The first true commercial mobile call was made somewhere in Saudi Arabia in 1977 using a system called NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephony). The snag here was that there were only about 1,200 subscribers at the time. Obviously, the origins of mobile telephony are somewhat murky. However, knowing the roots of mobile telephony helps us to understand the present situation and make a guess as to the future direction of mobile phones.

It was actually the use of a honeycomb of cells that revolutionised mobile telephony, rather than the creation of a portable phone with its own battery like the one Cooper was holding. Deploying a cell structure enabled a relatively small number of radio frequencies to be re-used over and over again. Sadly, the subsequent history of cellular mobile telephony has been wracked with competing standards. Although NMT made a good start in the Nordic countries, it was almost a case of each country to its own flavour.

Against this background, the European Union thought it would be a good idea if the same kind of handset worked in all of its member countries. Fortuitously, there was simultaneously a growing awareness that digital technology would eventually take precedence over its analogue predecessor. So a European body called the Groupe Spécial Mobile devised a new standard for digital networks, which became known as GSM. Billions of GSM phones exist today, making it by far the dominant technology. Digital mobile networks like GSM were recognised as being part of a new wave - a second generation - and they therefore took the name 2G.

Unfortunately, there was no consensus as to which technology was best for 2G. While Europe went with GSM and Japan went for JDC (Japan Digital Cellular), the USA took the biscuit and managed to adopt no fewer than four different flavours of 2G. The list included TDMA (Time-Division Multiple Access, originally known as D-AMPS); GSM; CDMA One and iDEN.

To make matters more confusing, the frequencies used by the original digital networks got overcrowded. Consequently, a new set was introduced under the general heading of PCS (Personal Communication Services). Against this background of competing technologies, there were great leaps being made in the design and format of mobile handsets.

Originally, cellular phones were fitted into vehicles so they didn’t need separate batteries. Early portables were very heavy - the best known was made by Motorola and was nicknamed the brick because of its looks. Battery life has improved considerably, but there was a far more important twist to cellular technology. 2G networks gave us SMS (Short Message Service), otherwise known as texting.

Texting is probably the greatest historical accident of technology in our time. It was meant as a tool for cellular engineers to contact each other and employed spare bandwidth. Nowadays billions of SMS messages are sent every day. Another unlikely success was the ringtone. When Nokia executives first predicted everyone would personalise their ringtone, the audience laughed. Ringtones are now part of a multi-million dollar industry, of course.

Another episode in cellular history, which most would dearly love to forget, was the birth of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). It was intended to create an industry standard for browsing the mobile internet, but never managed to inspire sufficient support. WAP isn’t dead, however, it is hidden. It’s the technology that delivers ringtones to a handset. The next cellular battlefield was the mobile phone operating system. The main handset vendors feared that Microsoft would remodel the mobile phone industry along the lines of PC, where the majority of the value would lie in the phone’s software, not in its hardware.

So, the phone vendors threw their collective weight behind Symbian - an OS (Operating System) originally developed for pocket computers by obscure Brit firm Psion. Meanwhile, the UK telco, BT, accidentally triggered the rise of handset vendor HTC by commissioning it to produce the first Windows driven handset, the XDA. Later, Microsoft also enlisted the help of another obscure British company, Sendo, to help produce the first ever Windows mobile phones.

A gauntlet has now been thrown down by a third contender, Google, which has inspired the first ever Android handset, the G1 from T-Mobile. Android itself relies heavily on the “Open” OS, Linux, and it’s free. So will Symbian be soon. Relatively quickly, both handset vendors and network operators agreed another generation (3G) of data centric phones were necessary.

Initially, 3G handsets concentrated on supporting video calling but that soon changed to offering high speed (HSDPA, or High Speed Downlink Packet Access) access to the mobile internet. The mobile phone which has punched way above its real weight, is of course, the iconic Iphone from Apple. The first version wasn’t even 3G. Nonetheless, this phone revolutionised the way handset designers think about user interfaces by employing touch control. It also proved that a mobile phone could surf the web almost as well as a PC.

We’re now getting close to a fourth generation (4G) of mobile phones, although it’s uncertain whether rival technologies LTE and Wimax will fight it out or co-exist. So, which direction do future mobile phones appear to be taking? For millions, the mobile phone provides the only available window onto the internet. Plus, the so-called "smartphone" is coming to offer virtually any facility a PC can provide - even Wifi access and playing MP3s. Unlike PCs, however, mobile phones now boast high definition digital cameras plus a built-in GPS (Satnav) support.

It’s long been predicted that Local Based Services, or LBS, will materialise as the killer application for mobile phones. Thanks to technologies like assisted GPS (A-GPS), the mobile phone has become the only internet access device which effectively knows its precise location. Such ability is great for helping its owner to get from A to B, but LBS goes further by intelligently filtering information based on the handset’s geographical coordinates. LBS goes way beyond providing simple directions to the nearest McDonald’s restaurant - it can help locate friends, family and colleagues wherever they might be. Almost certainly, LBS will give rise to a replacement for texting as the most popular non-voice application for mobile phones.

It’s just that nobody knows what form SMS version 2.0 will assume. X

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