The first cell-phone was made on April 3, 1973. Martin Cooper, an engineer working for Motorola, a US-firm, developed it. The first call he made from this device was to Joel Engel, an employee of the rival firm Bell Labs, 6th Avenue, NY. The device was called Dyna TAC.

Despite this, the phone took almost a decade to get marketed. Motorola started marketing Dyna TAC in 1983 in the USA for $4000, approximately Rs.4 lac. It was nicknamed a brick, and weighed almost a kilogram.

The first text message of Merry Christmas was sent on test basis on December 3, 1992. It was received by a Vodafone employee, Richard Jarvis. Later in 2021, the same pioneering message was sold for $1.5 lac or almost a crore of rupees as an NFT.

Nokia did some pioneering innovations in cell phone technology. It was a Finish brand. It introduced its model 6110 in 1997 making mobile games popular and introduced 7110 model in 1999 which became the first phone to use wireless networks for browsing.

Ten years later in 2007, Apple reinvented the cell phone by introducing iPhone. The launch was done by Steve Jobs. In 2008, HTC released an Android phone, using Google’s operating system.

Earlier in 2001, Japan had become the first country to use 3G mobile network.

In 2009, Stockholm became the first city to offer 4G coverage. WhatsApp too was launched in 2009. It was followed by many other messenger apps. These apps dislodged SMS from its prime messaging app position.

2011 brought the emoji fever. These were sketched by Kurita in 1999. They were made a part of the character library of smart phones.

Siri was made available as a digital voice assistant to Apple users in 2011. Later Google and Amazon too developed competing voice assistants.

South Korea became the first country to be covered by 5G in 2019.