Radiation Protection Today Spring 2025 Issue 8 | Page 41

Backscatter

Early mobile phones
The idea of a mobile phone goes back a surprisingly long way; a patent for a“ pocketsized folding telephone” was filed in 1917. However the first call from what we would now recognise as a mobile phone was made on 3 April 1973, when Martin Cooper of Motorola called his rival at another firm. Eleven years later the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was launched. At 25 cm long and weighing 1.1 kg it was nicknamed ' the Brick ' and was used mainly by business due to its high cost.
The first mobile phone call in the UK was made on 1 January 1985 by Vodaphone ' s chairman and for nine days Vodafone was the only network in Britain.
In 1992, the introduction of GSM( Global System for Mobile Communications) to the UK brought better voice quality, international roaming and the ability to send text messages. The Nokia 1011 was launched in the same year and was the first massproduced GSM phone. It weighed a( relatively) light 495g, and could receive, but not send, text messages.
The first smartphone was launched between 1992 and 1997- depending on the definition of a smartphone – and cameras appeared in 2000.
SMS Messaging
Text messaging, or SMS( Short Message Service), was developed in the 1980s as a way for network operators to send information to users. The first text message was sent from a computer to a mobile on 3 December 1992 when Neil Papworth wished a colleague " Merry Christmas ".
Text messaging gained popularity in the late 1990s. Mobiles then had alphanumeric keypads and so it would have taken eight keystrokes to type ' SRP '. Texts were originally limited to 160 characters and users were charged for each one – so it ' s no wonder that word-shortening like " tmr " instead of " tomorrow " and abbreviations such as ' LOL '( laugh out loud) quickly became popular.
Although emojis were first introduced in 1999, they became popular after 2010 when they were standardised by the Unicode Consortium, allowing their use across different devices and platforms.
SMS messaging reached its peak in 2012, when more than 150 billion text messages were sent in the UK, but the introduction of mobile messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, saw this drop to 32 billion messages in 2023. btw iyo was this a gr8 read, or @ least a gd try or r u:- \?
The Nokia 3210 was the first mass market phone with an internal antenna. Launched in 1999, it was the first to allow users to compose their own ringtones and the first with the game Snake.
Today there are more mobile phones than people in the world.
Radiation Protection Today Spring 2025 41