In 1973, Dr Martin Cooper, a Motorola employee in New York made the first ever phone call using a prototype Dyna TAC phone. He called his friend who worked at ATT. The phone weighed almost a kilogram and took about 10 hours to charge! Since then, we have come a long way in terms of mobile phone technology.

Let's go through the timeline of this spectacular evolution:

• 1979 : Japan, which has always been at the forefront of technology launchd the first commercially available cellular network which we now call "1G". It was only made available for cars.
• 1981 : The 1G network reaches the western parts of the world and is made available worldwide.
• 1983 : The first ever mobile phone, Motorola DynaTAC 8000X hits the markets and costs a whopping $4000 USD.
• 1985 : The first ever mobile phone call was made by Michael Harrison in the UK. He called his father and Sir Ernest Harrison, the Chairman of Vodafone.
• 1989 : The first ever portable mobile phone hits the markets, this was the Motorola 9800X which also had a flip down cover for the keypad.
• 1991 : Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) phone was launched. The 1G analogue system was replaced by the 2G digital cellular networks. 
• 1992 : The first ever text message was sent by Neil Papworth to Vodafone Director Richard Jarvis. The text message read "happy Christmas"
• 1994 : IBM launched Simon which had a touchscreen and also had apps. It cost $899 and only worked in a few states in the US. Nokia also launched the 2110, it was one of the smallest GSM phones available.
• 1996 : The first ever 'slider' phone was put out as the Nokia 8110. It was also called as the 'banana phone' because of its shape. It was the first device to have had a monochrome LCD screen. Motorola StarTAC was also launched as the first ever flip phone and sold millions of units all over the world.
• 1997 : The Snake game was launched by Nokia which had a great response worldwide. Siemens brought out the first coloured screen phone – the S10. 
• 2000 : The Sharp J-SH04 becomes the first camera phone in the market. BlackBerry launch their 857 that supported email and web browsing .
• 2003 : Nokia 1100 was released which turned out to be its best-selling phone of all time. 3G networks were introduced for the first time. 
• 2007 : The first iPhone was launched. It was an instant success.

The next decade saw a lot of advancements in this field and we have evolved from simple to smart.