How the journey of mobile phones began 40 years ago

Mobile phones have gone from bulky, heavy luxury item used solely to place phone calls to ultralight computers used for just about everything.

Let's take a peek into the journey of mobile phones.

Source: CNBC

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1973

Motorola launched the Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage (DynaTAC) portable phone in 1973, which laid the groundwork for present-day mobile phones. The then-president of Motorola, Martin Cooper, made the first phone call on the handheld device.

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1987

Hollywood actor Michael Douglas made Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which weighed nearly a kilo and came with a $4,000 price tag, famous around the world when he used it in superhit film, Wall Street, in 1987. The phone was using the first 1G technology.

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1993

IBM Simon, which had a price tag of $899, is considered the world's first smartphone. It was a mobile phone, pager, fax machine and personal digital assistant all rolled into one.

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1996

Motorola StarTAC was the first flip mobile phone in the world. It gained widespread traction in the market and also forced the telecom sector to introduce 2G technology.

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1999

Nokia 7110 was the first mobile phone in the world that allowed access to Internet, while Samsung SPH M100 was the first to have MP3 service.

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2002

Nokia 7650, which was featured in the Hollywood movie Minority Report, was the first mobile phone in the world to have a built-in camera. Sony Ericsson P800, which was launched in 2003, was the first to have a touchscreen. It ran on Symbian OS 7, had Bluetooth capability and VGA camera.

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2003

BlackBerry Quark 6210, which turned out to be a hit with users around the world, was the first BlackBerry device integrating the phone.

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2007

The main operating systems until 2007 were BlackBerry OS, Symbian and Windows Mobile, but Apple changed the whole industry with the launch of iPhone on June 29, 2007.

At that time iPhones had a price tag of $499 for the 4 GB model and $599 for the 8 GB model.

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2010

Samsung took on Apple's dominance of the mobile-phone market with the launch of Galaxy S in March 2010. The smartphone ran on Google's Android system, had a large touch-screen display, Wi-Fi, a five-megapixel camera and the fastest graphics processor. In less than a year, Samsung had sold more than 10 million Galaxy S devices around the globe.

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2013

Some of the biggest names in mobile-phone technology have launched new devices this year. Samsung came out with the latest Galaxy smartphone in March, BlackBerry introduced Z10, also in March, and Apple launched iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C early this month.

Today there are six billion mobile-phone subscriptions around the world, with about 87 per cent penetration of the global population.