Detailed · 25 events
A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones
1990s
03 events
Miguel Durán / Museo8bits (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ Palm Computing, then a subsidiary of US Robotics, launched the Palm Pilot 1000 (128 KB) and Pilot 5000 (512 KB) in 1996. After the Apple Newton and other oversized PDAs failed in the market, Palm bet on three things: a shirt-pocket form factor, HotSync synchronisation with the PC, and the Graffiti handwriting input system. With a stylus-driven resistive touchscreen, a bespoke OS, and weeks of life on a pair of AAA batteries, Palm sold roughly one million units by 1997 and effectively owned the PDA category. It set the template for later smartphone UIs, the home-screen grid, and the desktop-sync culture.
NTT DoCoMo (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain (PD-textlogo; trademark of NTT DoCoMo) · Commons ↗ On 22 February 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode: a dedicated browser, a corpus of official sites written in cHTML (compact HTML), packet-based billing on a monthly subscription starting at JPY 300, and an official portal curated by DoCoMo. It was the world's first mass-market mobile-internet platform. Subscribers passed twenty million within three years and peaked at forty-nine million in 2010. Ringtones, emoji, mobile games, QR code scanning — a great deal of the mobile-internet culture that would later be exported worldwide began here. On 31 March 2026, i-mode shut down alongside 3G FOMA, closing twenty-seven years of operation.
Shiny Things via Flickr / Traveler100 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ On 19 January 1999, the Canadian firm Research In Motion (RIM) launched the BlackBerry 850. A two-way pager form factor with a thumb-typed hardware QWERTY keyboard and push email (immediate, encrypted server-to-device delivery), it became the standard tool of US corporate executives, lawyers, and Wall Street. At its peak in 2009 it counted fifty million users worldwide. President Obama's reluctance to give up his BlackBerry on inauguration became the emblem of the 2000s 'corporate smartphone'. Pushed back by the iPhone and Android wave from 2007, RIM exited its own handset business in 2016 and turned the brand into a licensing operation.
2000s
05 events
Miguel Durán / Museo8bits (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 2.5 · Commons ↗ On 26 June 2002, Nokia launched the Nokia 7650 — the first mass-produced device running Symbian OS on the Series 60 (later S60) platform, and Nokia's first camera phone. With a slide-up body, a 176×208-pixel colour screen, GPRS data, and open Symbian application execution, Nokia established the template for what would later be called the smartphone. Symbian reached 65% of the global smartphone OS market by 2007 and cumulative sales of around 250 million devices. Then the iPhone and Android arrived; Nokia collapsed, sold the handset business to Microsoft in 2014, and Microsoft sold it on in 2016, ending the lineage.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
Rafael Fernandez / TheGoldenBox (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Unveiled by Steve Jobs at Macworld in January 2007, the iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29 of the same year. By dropping the physical keyboard in favour of capacitive multi-touch and putting an OS X-derived operating system on a phone, the device rewrote the grammar of the product category that would later be called the smartphone.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Related terms
- Multi-touch
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Operating Systems · A History of the iPhone
The first shipping device—HTC Dream, sold in the US as the T-Mobile G1—running the OS Google had acquired with the 2005 purchase of Android Inc. A Linux kernel, a Java VM (later replaced by the Android Runtime), and a custom UI stack: Google's strategy of supplying an open-source smartphone OS was the inverse of Apple's, and over the next decade and a half grew into an ecosystem accounting for more than 70% of the world's smartphones.
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- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Operating Systems
The second generation, released a year after the original. It added 3G data, dropped the entry price to US$199 for 8 GB to expand the market, and—paired with the App Store, which had opened the day before—pushed the iPhone into the category of phone-plus-runtime-for-applications. Released simultaneously in 22 countries, it ceased to be a US-only device.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
The 'S' stood for Speed. CPU, GPU, and memory were upgraded enough to roughly double performance over the original. Video recording, voice control, a digital compass, and voice memos were added; iPhone OS 3.0 finally brought copy-and-paste, MMS, and a landscape keyboard. The 'S generation' pattern—refine in the off year between major redesigns—was established here.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
2010s
12 events
Justin14 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ Apple branded the new 326-ppi panel the 'Retina display', claiming the human eye could not resolve individual pixels at normal viewing distance. The industrial design shifted to glass front and back with a stainless-steel sidewall—an aesthetic vocabulary that defined every iPhone that followed. The same stainless-steel band, however, doubled as the antenna; certain grips caused noticeable signal loss, triggering the 'Antennagate' affair, one of the most prominent PR failures in Apple's history.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Related terms
- Retina Display
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
Rafael Fernandez / TheGoldenBox (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ Samsung Electronics launched the Galaxy S (GT-I9000) in Europe on 4 June 2010, with the United States following from later that summer. A 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 (Hummingbird) SoC, Android 2.1 Eclair (later updated to 2.3) — Samsung's first serious Android flagship sold ten million units worldwide within six months. The S line has continued almost annually since, reaching the Galaxy S25 as of 2024, with cumulative S-series sales above one billion units. Through the patent litigation with Apple from 2011 (settled for billions of dollars) and the Galaxy Note 7 fires of 2016, Samsung has held the world's largest annual smartphone shipment number for more than a decade.
- Related organizations
- Google · Apple Inc.
- Related terms
- OLED (Organic LED)
Dual-core A5, an eight-megapixel camera, and the Siri voice assistant. Steve Jobs died on 5 October, the day after the unveiling—the 4S effectively became his last product. Siri, derived from a startup spun out of SRI International and acquired by Apple, pushed the idea of operating a smartphone through natural language into the mainstream.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence · A History of the iPhone
The aspect ratio shifted from 3:2 to 16:9 and the display grew to four inches. The body was thinner, in aluminium, and supported LTE for the first time. The most divisive change was the replacement of the nine-year-old 30-pin Dock connector with the reversible 8-pin Lightning—an overnight invalidation of the entire third-party accessory market.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
The home button became a fingerprint sensor: Touch ID brought biometric unlock and purchase authorisation to the mainstream. At the same time the A7 became the first 64-bit smartphone processor in the world—a transition the industry had expected two years later, and one that took competitors including Qualcomm by surprise. Touch ID would later become the foundation for Apple Pay (2014).
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Related terms
- Touch ID
- Appears in
- A History of Semiconductors and Hardware · A History of the iPhone
Two models, 4.7 and 5.5 inches: Apple finally entered the 'phablet' market, four years after the Samsung Galaxy Note opened it. Ten million units sold on the opening weekend, breaking every previous iPhone launch record. Apple Pay was announced the same day, bringing NFC-and-tokenisation mobile payments to mass scale.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
The pressure-sensitive '3D Touch' display arrived—an attempt to add a new input dimension based on how hard the user pressed. Neither developers nor users adopted it widely; beginning with the iPhone XR in 2018, Apple phased it out. One of the rare UI features Apple released and quietly withdrew.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
Apple removed the 3.5 mm headphone jack—an electronics standard for nearly a century—from the iPhone. The word Phil Schiller used at the unveiling, 'courage', was widely mocked as emblematic of Apple's hubris. In practice, the decision pushed wireless earbuds into the consumer-electronics mainstream; AirPods, launched the same day, became Apple's largest peripheral business within a few years.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
A small body—the 4-inch shell from iPhone 5—stuffed with iPhone 6s internals. Aimed at users left behind by the move to larger screens and at emerging markets needing a lower entry price, it established a permanent slot in Apple's lineup: the 'inexpensive but current-generation' iPhone.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Ten years after the original unveiling, Apple removed two of the iPhone's defining elements at once—the physical home button and the fingerprint sensor. In their place came the 'notch' at the top of the screen, embedding a depth sensor and an infrared projector for Face ID. Combined with the bezel-less OLED display, the iPhone's industrial design was rewritten from scratch for a second time.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Related terms
- Face ID · OLED (Organic LED)
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
The 'notched' design language introduced by iPhone X was rolled out across the lineup with the higher-end OLED XS and XS Max alongside the LCD-based, more colourful, less expensive XR. The experimental flagship of one year earlier had become Apple's whole lineup.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
The standard iPhone 11 and Pro/Pro Max established the iPhone as a 'camera with a phone behind it': multiple rear lenses became normal across the lineup. Night Mode, debuting here, lifted low-light photography sharply—handheld dusk shots ceased to be the preserve of dedicated cameras.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
2020s
05 eventsApple's first 5G iPhone, and the generation that returned to the flat-sided industrial language of the iPhone 4. A magnet array on the back revived the 'MagSafe' name—once retired from the MacBook—as both a wireless-charging standard and an accessory-attachment system. Announced during the pandemic, it launched a month later than the usual September window.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Related terms
- MagSafe
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
The TrueDepth notch shrank by 20% for the first time since iPhone X. The Pro models gained ProMotion: a variable-refresh display running from 10 to 120 Hz, an upgrade that scrolling and animation made viscerally obvious. Battery life also improved meaningfully. A quiet, well-rounded year for the iPhone.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
The five-year run of the iPhone X notch ended—on Pro models. Two punch-hole cutouts replaced it, and the OS treated the black region as a dynamic, interactive UI element: the Dynamic Island, expanding and contracting to display ongoing activities. A hardware constraint (the location of the front camera and sensors) was reframed not as a flaw to be hidden but as a feature to be celebrated. The always-on display arrived in the same generation.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
Kyu3a (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ The eleven-year Lightning era ended; USB-C took its place. Less an internal Apple choice than a forced compliance with the EU's Common Charger Directive (adopted 2022, mandatory by the end of 2024)—a symbolic turn at which a port standard was set by regulation. The Pro models also gained USB 3 transfer speeds (up to 10 Gbps).
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Related terms
- USB Type-C (USB-C)
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
The generation built around Apple Intelligence—Apple's own generative-AI suite. Summarisation, rewriting, image generation, and a strengthened Siri were designed to run on-device wherever possible, with selected workloads offloaded to dedicated Apple servers (Private Cloud Compute). A hardware-and-OS co-design intended to keep the AI surface on the device from being ceded to OpenAI or Google.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence · A History of the iPhone