50 Fun Facts About Smartphones

Which device, released in 1994, is retrospectively described as the first true smartphone?

It had a 4.5-inch touchscreen, could send faxes and email, sold 50,000 units and had a battery that lasted about an hour.

Which company manufactured the IBM Simon after Motorola turned the job down?

Motorola feared IBM could become a rival phone maker; BellSouth sold the finished product on its analogue AMPS network.

Which engineer made the first public call from a handheld cellphone on a Manhattan sidewalk on 3 April 1973?

He worked for Motorola and phoned his rival at Bell Labs; he is known as the father of the handheld cellphone.

How much did the Motorola DynaTAC, the first commercially available handheld cellphone, cost in 1984?

It took ten hours to charge, stored 30 numbers on an LED display, and had waiting lists despite its weight.

How much talk time did the DynaTAC offer on a full charge?

Consumer demand was strong regardless, and there were waiting lists.

The Nokia 9000 Communicator of 1996, one of the earliest smartphones, ran on which processor?

Its clamshell design opened to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard, and it cost £1,000 at launch.

Who unveiled the first iPhone at Macworld on 9 January 2007?

Development had begun in secret in 2005 as Project Purple 2, and the phone reached US shops on 29 June 2007.

What did the 4 GB first-generation iPhone cost at its US launch in June 2007?

The 8 GB model was $599, and both required a two-year contract; Apple cut prices sharply that September.

With which US carrier did Apple secretly develop the original iPhone at an estimated cost of $150 million?

Cingular, later AT&T Mobility, gave Apple free rein after the disappointing Motorola ROKR collaboration.

How big was the first iPhone's multi-touch display?

It had just four physical buttons and a ringer switch, and its finger-friendly screen needed no pen.

How many days did it take Apple to sell its one millionth iPhone?

It sold 270,000 in the first week in the US, though European launches were described as sluggish.

How many applications were available when Apple's App Store opened on 10 July 2008?

The count peaked near 2.2 million in 2017 before Apple began purging old and 32-bit apps.

Which company developed the Android operating system?

It bought Android Inc. in 2005 for at least $50 million, a purchase later called its 'best deal ever'.

Android is based on a modified version of which kernel?

The company persuaded the Linux Foundation in 2017 to extend long-term kernel support from two years to six.

Which Android co-founder had earlier created the T-Mobile Sidekick at his company Danger?

Android Inc. started out in 2003 building an operating system for digital cameras before pivoting to phones.

In what unusual venue was Android introduced to the press on 23 September 2008?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were among those presenting; the early prototype had looked like a BlackBerry until the iPhone appeared.

For years, major Android versions were named alphabetically after what?

The first two were internally called Astro Boy and Bender; the practice ended with Android 10 in 2019 because the names were not 'inclusive'.

The Play Store, launched in March 2012, replaced which earlier app store name?

The rebrand pulled the company's Music, Movies and Books services under one roof.

Since which year has Android been the most used smartphone operating system in the world?

It now has the largest installed base of any operating system on Earth, with billions of users.

Samsung's first Android phone, launched in June 2009, began which product line?

At the time Samsung's flagship was the Windows Mobile-powered Omnia; the new line arguably took Android mainstream.

Which Samsung phone did the company have to recall by the millions in 2016 because of exploding batteries?

Most phones use lithium-ion or lithium-polymer cells for their high energy density.

The Apple-Samsung 'patent war' began when Apple claimed which Samsung phone copied the iPhone 3GS?

Sony, HTC and others were also drawn into a wave of smartphone patent litigation.

Which Canadian company, founded in Waterloo, Ontario, created the BlackBerry?

Its first BlackBerry, launched in 1999, was a two-way pager on the Mobitex network.

Why was the name 'BlackBerry' chosen from about 40 candidates?

Marketing firm Lexicon Branding came up with it, and the device pioneered push email and 'thumb typing'.

Which organisation became BlackBerry's biggest customer thanks to its reputation for secure communications?

The BlackBerry Pearl of 2006 and BlackBerry Messenger later pulled in mainstream consumers too.

Which operating system, descended from Psion's EPOC and used mainly by Nokia, was the world's most popular smartphone OS until the end of 2010?

It held 67% of the global smartphone market in 2006 before iOS and Android overtook it.

In February 2011, Nokia announced it would adopt which company's operating system as its primary smartphone platform?

Its Lumia range followed, and by 2013 the Lumia 520 alone accounted for most Windows Phones sold.

Windows Phone 7, launched in October 2010, replaced Windows Mobile and which Microsoft music-player brand?

Its tile-based look came from Microsoft's Metro design language.

How many units did the Nokia 3310, launched in 2000, sell worldwide?

Its cult reputation for being 'indestructible' spawned endless drop-test videos, and a modernised version appeared in 2017.

Which hugely popular game came pre-loaded on the Nokia 3310?

Its other three games were Pairs II, Space Impact and Bantumi.

The world's first automatic analogue cellular (1G) network was launched in 1979 for car phones in which city?

NTT ran it; Nordic NMT systems followed in 1981 and the first US network in 1983.

In which year was the first machine-generated SMS text message sent, in the UK?

The first person-to-person text followed a year later, and the first ringtone went on sale in 1998.

Which country launched the first GSM (2G) network, Radiolinja, in 1991?

Europe's 1G systems were quickly shut down to free the 900 MHz band for the new digital networks.

NTT DoCoMo launched the world's first commercial 3G network in October 2001 using which technology?

South Korea's SK Telecom and KTF followed in 2002 with rival CDMA2000 networks.

Who is credited with the well-known 1999 DoCoMo emoji set for i-mode?

The word combines the Japanese e (picture) and moji (character); its likeness to 'emotion' is coincidence.

Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries name its 2015 Word of the Year?

A 2017 study of over a billion messages found the same emoji to be the most used in the world.

Screens larger than about 5.2 inches earned phones what nickname?

Anything over 4.5 inches is hard to use with one hand, though taller aspect ratios since 2017 have helped.

Which 2016 phone kicked off the disappearance of the standard headphone jack from major handsets?

An adapter that hogs the charging port can bring the plug back, or you buy Bluetooth headphones.

Which two 2013 phones started the trend of building fingerprint scanners into the home button?

Physical front buttons have since largely given way to on-screen controls.

How many smartphones were shipped worldwide in 2019 alone?

By 2020 about 75 percent of the world's population were smartphone users.

Which sensor, fitted to Samsung flagships from 2012 and iPhones from 2014, measures air pressure to estimate altitude?

Only two 2013 Samsung models ever carried temperature and humidity sensors.

Which sensor lets a smartphone act as a digital compass?

Accelerometers and gyroscopes handle screen rotation, and an RGB sensor tunes screen colour.

Which engineer at Britain's Royal Radar Establishment described the first finger-driven capacitive touchscreen in 1965?

Multi-touch arrived in 1982 at the University of Toronto, using a frosted-glass panel with a camera behind it.

IBM first showed its smartphone prototype, codenamed 'Sweetspot', at which 1992 trade show?

USA Today put engineer Frank Canova and the prototype on the front of its Money section the next day.

According to the Apple chief's original vision in 2000, what did he want to eliminate from touchscreen devices?

Apple's own Newton of 1993 had used one; the iPhone's capacitive multi-touch screen made fingers enough.

Which company first used 'smartphone' as a single lowercase word, in 1997, for its GS88 concept?

Variants like 'Smart Phone' had appeared in the press since 1980.

LG made the first phone with a large capacitive touchscreen, in 2006, with which fashion house?

Its 3-inch screen beat the iPhone's unveiling by a month, though it was a feature phone rather than a smartphone.

Which company released the first commercial camera phone, the Visual Phone VP-210, in Japan in 1999?

Marketed as a 'mobile videophone', it had a 110,000-pixel front camera and stored up to 20 JPEGs.

What was the first Android phone, a horizontal slider released in October 2008?

It was sold in the US as the T-Mobile G1.

Which 2012 Nokia phone was the first with optical image stabilisation in its camera?

Stabilisation allows longer exposures for low-light shots; the first stabilised front camera came on the HTC 10 in 2016.