Mobile milestones: how your phone became an essential part of your life | O2 OnePlus stories
Has any device changed our lives as much, and as quickly, as the mobile phone? There are people today for whom the world of address books, street atlases and phone boxes seems very far away, lost in the mists of time. These are just 10 of the big milestones from the past 30 years that have made almost everything we do easier, more public and very, very fast.
The first phones arrive â€" and become status symbols
Few people got the chance to use the very early mobile phones. The first call was made in New York in 1973, but handsets with a network to use were not available until 1983 in the US, and 1985 in the UK. That first British mobile phone was essentially a heavy briefcase with a receiver attached by a wire. It cost £2,000 (£5,000 in today’s prices), and gave you half an hour’s chat on an overnight charge. Making a call was not something you could do subtly, but that wasn’t the point; the first handsets were there to be seen. They sent a message: that you were bold and confident with new technology, that you were busy and important enough to need a mobile phone, and were rich enough to buy one.
Text messages spawn a whole new language
The first mobiles worked with analogue signals and could only make phone calls, but the digital ones that followed in the early 1990s could send SMS messages as well. After the first message was sent on 3 December 1992, texting took off like a rocket, even though it was still a pretty cumbersome procedure. On a 12-button keypad, it took four presses to produce one letter (if it was a Z or an S), and even more if you mistakenly pressed too many times and had to go round again. Handsets with predictive text would make things easier, but in the 1990s you could save a lot of time by removing all excess letters from a message, often the vowels, and so txtspk ws brn. Today the average mobile phone sends more than 100 texts per month.
Phones turn us all into photographers ...
There seemed to be no good reason for the first camera phones, which began to appear in 2002, with resolutions of about 0.3 megapixels. They took grainy, blurry pictures on postage stamp-sized screens, and even these filled the phone’s memory in no time. Gradually, though, as the quality improved, the uses followed. As well as the usual photos of friends and family, they were handy for “saving†pieces of paper, and in pubs you could take a picture of the specials board and take it back to your table. Modern camera phones have changed beyond recognition in the past 20 years. The new O2 OnePlus 5 boasts the highest resolution dual camera on a smartphone: a 16-megapixel camera and a 20-megapixel camera side-by-side. The dual camera allows users to focus on their subjects, while blurring out the background, producing professional-looking portraits.
… and we turn ourselves into celebrities
Twenty years ago people would have thought you a little strange if you took flattering photos of yourself and your lifestyle and then distributed them to your friends â€" let alone to members of the public. If you used printed photographs rather than a smartphone app, they would still think so today. Yet sharing our lives on social media is now the norm, not the exception â€" and it was the camera phone that made it all possible. Now, phones such as the OnePlus 5 come with an enormous 64GB of memory, so you can capture, share and store an almost countless number of videos and pictures â€" well, certainly enough to keep up with the Kardashians.
The paper address book becomes obsolete
At first, mobile phones seemed to create a whole new clutch of numbers for you to remember. However, because your device simply stored all your numbers â€" mobile and landline â€" and addresses â€" postal and email â€" all the work was done for you. For a few years this meant that when you lost your phone, you lost all your numbers, or had to re-enter them when you got a replacement. But the ancient practice of updating your paper address book, having hunted through every drawer in the house for it, was ended almost overnight.
However, this also made the social side of communication much more complicated. When calling the mobile of someone who knew you, they could now see who it was calling before they answered. With texts and emails available as alternatives, a call to a mobile phone began to seem especially personal and invasive, unless you had reason to believe it would be welcome.
We find ourselves always on call
It used to be easy to tell when the working day had ended â€" it ended when you left work. If something important then happened it didn’t matter, because you wouldn’t know about it. Even a call to your home might go unanswered if you were out, which would be the end of the matter until the following day. Now it’s so easy to stay in touch with the office that in some cultures it’s almost a dereliction of duty not to do so. Smartphones made switching off a skill, which not everyone has mastered â€" yet.
Landlines and phone boxes begins to vanish
By the first quarter of 2016, just 7% of adults in the UK did not own or use a mobile phone. Twice as many had a mobile only, with no landline. In fact, the decline of the traditional home phone has been steeper than these figures suggest. Because to have broadband internet installed at home, you have to rent a phone line from one of the providers. But you don’t have to use it. In a survey, 17% of people aged over 55 said that their mobile had already replaced their landline; 51% of 18-24 year olds said the same.
At the same time, Britain’s phone boxes have been almost entirely forgotten, except by tourists. Today there are about 46,000 phone boxes still in place around the UK, 8,000 of which are the famous red ones. Many decommissioned boxes have been put to ingenious uses, becoming kiosks or art galleries, or storage sites for defibrillators.
Phones find us love
If you could take a modern mobile phone back to the 1980s, the maps would amaze, the Snapchat filters would delight, but when you got to Tinder, Happn, Grindr, Bumble and all the other dating apps then people’s jaws would hit the floor.
Modern dating apps make it possible to flirt with large numbers of people simultaneously â€" sometimes in the knowledge that they’re sitting just a few metres away. This has made the love lives of the young look totally different to those of past generations, now that a date is only a few messages away.
We learn to buy things here and now
What our ancestors called “impulse shopping†looks positively cautious now. For example, you’re at a party, chatting, and someone recommends a book. In the past, if you were organised, you might have jotted something in the notebook that you carried around with you everywhere. More likely you forgot about it. Today, you can buy the book with your phone before the person finishes talking about it. You can have it delivered to your house the next day, or even read it on the same screen on the bus home. Nor is that the end of it, because with Android Pay you can use your phone as your bus ticket.
Our phones replace our record collections
For a long time the story of listening was comfortable and steady. Flexible, better quality and more capacious LPs superseded 78s; then cassettes joined the party; before CDs replaced both. Even with the arrival of MP3s (in 1993), Napster (1999) and the iPod (2001), it was still not obvious to most people that this was the dawn of playing almost any music, instantly, with your phones. Streaming services changed all that. Once screens, memory and bandwidth became large enough to make casual streaming â€" into a phone and out to a speaker â€" easy for everyone, the phone became the only device a music-lover needs.
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