Have you got a mobile phone?

Mobile phones have a longer history than might be expected. The first mobile phones were in fact in use in 1946, when the Swedish police had them in their police cars. These quickly spread to the US and elsewhere, and by the 1950s there were devices that basically looked like very large versions of today’s mobile phones.

Mobile phones remained an expensive and minority item until the 1980s, when they became car phones. These phones were designed for permanent installation in a car, meaning their size and power usage weren’t much of an issue. Companies began to buy large quantities of these for businessmen to keep in their cars, and the industry saw the kind of demand there was for mobile phones.

As technology advanced and became cheaper thanks to the massive demand for car phones, the first truly mobile phones emerged. In the 1990s, advances in battery technology turned phones from being “bricks” into the sleek little devices we know today.

However, since the mid-1990s, surprisingly little has happened to mobile phones. Sure, they’ve gotten prettier, with their clamshell form factors and silver cases, but in terms of phone technology, they’re pretty much in the same place. Instead of wanting better phone service, people have started using their phones as cameras, mp3 players, or to play games on the go.

The next generation of phone technology itself is here: it’s known as 3G and you’ve probably heard of it. Yet for some reason, no one seems to really care about 3G. Sure, you can watch videos on your mobile, but it costs a bomb, and few people really want to do that. It turns out those tiny phones have an unexpected limitation: Their screens are too small for anyone to really be interested in using them to access the Internet or any of the other fancy things you can do with 3G. Unless a revolutionary app comes along, it looks like we’re going to have today’s phones for a long time.