Evolution of Mobile Phones

Mobile rigs were the beginning of mobile phones for use in vehicles such as taxicab radios, two way radios in police cruisers, and the like. Originally, mobile phones were permanently installed in vehicles, but later versions such as the so-called transportables or "bag phones" could also be carried, and thus could be used as either mobile or as portable phones.
In Europe, radio telephony was first used on the first-class passenger trains between Berlin and Hamburg since 1926. At the same time, radio telephony was introduced on passenger airplanes for air traffic security. Later radio telephony was introduced on a large scale in German tanks during the Second world war. After the war German police in the British zone of occupation first used disused tank telephony equipment to run the first radio patrol cars.
The first fully automatic mobile phone system, called MTA (Mobile Telephone system A), was developed by Ericsson and commercially released in Sweden in 1956. This was the first system that didn't require any kind of manual control, but had the disadvantage of a phone weight of 40 kg (88 lbs). MTB, an upgraded version with transistors (weighing "only" 9 kg), was introduced in 1965 and used dual-tone multifrequency signaling. It had 150 customers in the beginning and 600 when it shut down in 1983.

First Gen Mobile Phones (1G)
The first handheld 1G mobile phone to become commercially available was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which received approval in 1983.
In 1984, Motorola lead the way with its Motorola DynaTAC 8000X "Brick Phone", which weighed 2 pounds, offered only one half hour of talktime and sold for $3,995. Developed by Rudy Krolopp, later dubbed the father of the wireless phone by Motorola's Chief Executive Officer, the phone was the first of its kind. The design took nearly 10 years and a total of $100 million in development costs before its official unveiling.
In 1984 there were 25,000 cell phones sold in the U.S. In 1990 that number had grown to 18,88,000 units sold, and in the year 2000. 52,600,00 units were sold – a million phones a week!

Second Gen (2G)
In the 1990s, second generation (2G) mobile phone systems such as GSM, IS-136 ("TDMA"), iDEN and IS-95 ("CDMA") began to be introduced. The first digital cellular phone call was made in the United States in 1990, in 1991 the first GSM network opened in Europe. 2G phone systems were characterized by digital circuit switched transmission and the introduction of advanced and fast phone to network signaling. In general the frequencies used by 2G systems in Europe were higher though with some overlap, for example the 900 MHz frequency range was used for both 1G and 2G systems in Europe and so such 1G systems were rapidly closed down to make space for 2G systems. In America the IS-54 standard was deployed in the same band as AMPS and displaced some of the existing analog channels.
Companies like Nokia, Sony Erricson, Panasonic, Samsung came up with games like Poker on their handsets. Other features like camera, Color LCD, Polyphonic ringtones, MMS were also introduced in 2G mobiles.

Third Gen (3G)
Not long after the introduction of 2G networks, projects began to develop third generation (3G) systems. Inevitably there were many different standards with different contenders pushing their own technologies. Quite differently from 2G systems, however, the meaning of 3G has been standardized in the IMT-2000 standardization processing. This process did not standardize on a technology, but rather on a set of requirements (2 Mbit/s maximum data rate indoors, 384 kbit/s outdoors, for example). At that point, the vision of a single unified worldwide standard broke down and several different standards have been introduced.


World Mobile Market
RNCOS’ “World Mobile Market (2006)”, report provides extensive research and objective analysis on the growing marketplace for the global mobile handset industry-

-Key Technologies Analyzed
Key Handset technologies including the most recent one as GSM, CDMA, 1xEV-DO, WiFi VoIP, TDMA, 3G, 4G and Blue Tooth are also analyzed supported by the facts like revenues and the market share.

-Key Players Analyzed
This section provides the overview, key facts and numbers and key competitors of several players like Alcatel, Ericsson, Fujitsu Microelectronics, Intel Corporation, Nokia, LG, Sony Ericssion, Motorola, Siemens, Samsung, Sun Microsystems, NTT Docomo, RF Micro Devices, Zarlink Semiconductor Infineon Technologies, Panasonic, Mitsubishi Electric, Sprint, Nextel, AT & T Wireless, Vodafone, China Mobile (Hong Kong) Limited, Deutsche Telekom AG, China Unicom, Telefónica Móviles, América Móvil, France Telecom /Orange, Telenor, TeliaSonera, Cingular

-Key Findings
The mobile handset sales continue to grow worldwide, going up from 482.5 million in 2003 to 816.5 million in 2005. This growth rate is expected to gradually slow down over a period of five years. The estimated growth figures for these five years are—10% in 2005, 7.7% in 2006, 6.4% in 2007, 4.8% in 2008 and 2.6% in 2009. Notwithstanding the gradual decline in the growth figures, the annual handset sales are predicted to reach more than US $ 3 Billion by 2009.