Analogue to AI: There were once networks that are retroactively called 0G. They depended on radio waves and were the ones that powered car phones, for instance. The switch from analogue to 1G, which used high-frequency microwaves, was a dramatic advancement. Japan’s Nippon Telegraph and Telephone was the first to develop such a commercial cellular network, in 1979.
By the mid-1980s, there were companies around the world offering cellular service. The early 1990s saw the birth of 2G, the first network where speech was encoded in digitally encrypted signals. The digital exchange of data enabled features such as SMS, conference-calling and caller ID too. 3G represented a boom in speeds and carrying capacity, which allowed the exchange of images and videos, email and emojis.
We are currently transitioning from 4G to 5G, with both these networks also embedded in smart fridges and washing machines, cars, speakers, even fans and lights. 6G is now in the research and development phase and will likely be a phase of telephony enhanced by artificial intelligence.
Were they playing your tune? Ringtones were a $6 billion industry as recently as 2006, according to data from Jupiter Research. Boyfriends gifted them to girlfriends, parents to children. Users paid for them monthly, and switched them often, in keeping with chart-topping tunes.
At their peak, customers were paying up to $5 per month in the US and ₹50 per month in India, for a unique tone. It was a revenue-spinner for service providers and music labels. T-Series, Saregama and Sony Music earned up to ₹150 crore a year from licensing their music to telecom companies, according to the national association of music labels, IMI (Indian Music Industry). Custom ringtones and caller tunes are still available, but who even makes calls or keeps the ringer on these days?
Playing the field: Tetris was the first game built into a mobile device (the Hagenuk Globalhandy in 1994), but Nokia’s Snake was the first to, in a sense, go viral. The simple interface of a black line slithering across a two-inch backlit screen, consuming dots, growing and moving faster, was launched in 1997. But it began to be packaged with every Nokia phone from the 3310 onwards, and that model launched in 2000 was durable and widely used.
The game used a cyclic loop (Snake went through the bottom and came back out on top of the screen) and haptic feedback (a happy buzz indicated when it was fed, a dreadful one signalled that it had crashed into itself and died). It was slow, plain, but oddly riveting.
For a time, one could buy more exciting games on memory cards: poker, pool, golf, bowling, racing. Then, in July 2008, the iPhone App Store was launched, and it changed everything. The Android Market was launched about three months later.
Users no longer had to depend on built-in apps. Today’s popular games — whether PubG Mobile or Candy Crush Saga — remain largely free but must be downloaded, and depend for revenue on ads and in-app purchases. Versions of Snake and Tetris are still available, but most are so colourful, they just don’t feel like the real thing.
Close call: Did the internet have to be involved in the exchange of data? In 1994, the idea for Bluetooth was conceived by Ericsson engineer Jaap Haartsen of the Netherlands. He created a tiny module that could sit within a device and communicate wirelessly with any nearby device that had the same module, without the use of the Net.
It was such a revolutionary idea that the world of telecommunications got behind it. In 1998, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (BSIG), an informal association between Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba, was set up to develop and promote the technology, and deploy it seamlessly. Bluetooth was added to mobile phones in 2001.
BSIG now has over 30,000 member companies, with the technology incorporated into a growing range of devices that include headphones, printers, smart home systems and gaming controllers.
A software marketplace: Launched in 1994, the IBM Simon Personal Communicator was the world’s first smartphone, the world’s first touchscreen phone, and the first phone in the world with apps. These included a calendar, address book, notepad, e-mail app and calculator.
Early mobile phones had pre-installed apps — games, ringtone editors, even the SMS inbox — but one didn’t think of them as such because the app world in general offered limited functionality, primarily because these devices were not connected to the internet.
Apps as we know them only became prevalent with the launch of the App Store in 2008. That first iteration offered more than 500 applications for users to choose from, forever changing how we interacted with our mobile devices and how our devices interacted with the world. It was the marketplace Steve Jobs had envisioned in the early 1980s, when he spoke of a space where software could be bought over phonelines.
There are now apps for wearables such as the smartwatch. There are mobile apps for banking, e-commerce, schools, stock trading. Even Vipassana meditation retreats suggest you book your digital detox break on their app.
Message received: Part of the reason we have SMS lingo – the LOLs, GTGs, TTYLs – is that the earliest versions of the short message service only allowed 160 characters, and most phone plans offered only 35 free SMSes a month. This was in the 1990s.
By the mid-Aughts, things were already changing dramatically. Advances in mobile technology had introduced the Multimedia Messaging Service or MMS, which allowed users to exchange image, graphic and text files. In 2005, Research in Motion or RIM, the creators of the BlackBerry, introduced BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), the world’s first phone messaging service deployed via the internet. Users were charged for data usage, but not per text. BBM also offered read receipts, stickers, group chat features, and ruled the texting world until WhatsApp appeared in 2009, available for every smartphone.
iPhone’s iMessage feature was launched in 2011, Telegram in 2013, Signal in 2014. Today’s SMS inbox, as a result, is just a graveyard of bank alerts and OTP prompts. Especially in India, where a OTP is used for just about anything.
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