Mobile Phone Firsts

Back when I used to work in manufacturing, there was a commonly held belief that in the automotive market, the Mercedes S-Class is somewhat of a trailblazer in the industry, in that the majority of features which are now common in many cars were first introduced in the S-Class. Technologies such ABS, Airbags, ESC, Crumple zones, 3 point seat belts (plus several others) all first saw light in the S-Class.

We were talking about this in the office recently and it got us thinking if a similar trend is present in the mobile phone industry. Is there a single manufacturer or product range which is responsible for introducing cutting edge features which are now common in mobile phones? To answer this question, I drew up a list of what we considered to be mainstream features in mobiles and tracked down which handset they first appeared in. From this list I would easily be able to see if there was one dominant handset range or manufacturer who can truly be called the most innovative.

Well, the simple answer was no. Although some of the large players (Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola) crop up several times in the list, it’s hard to say that there is one single manufacturer which is the most innovative, as you can see the list of features and handsets below. What is interesting is how many of these phones are relatively unknown - they are the unsung heroes of the mobile phone industry, blazing the way with new features, but lacking the praise of other phones which popularised the features. One example is the MP3 player; mention music phone to most people and they will think of a Sony Ericsson Walkman or the iPhone, although few would know it was the humble Siemens SL45 which started the trend way back in 2001.

So here is my list of mainstream mobile phone features, and the (GSM) phones they first appeared in:

• T9 / Predictive text – Nokia 3210
• WAP Browser – Nokia 7110
• Bluetooth - Sony Ericsson T36
• Triband – Motorola Timeport L7089
• Removable memory – Siemens SL45
• MP3 Player – Siemens SL45
• GPRS – Motorola Timeport T-260
• MMS – Nokia 7210
• Colour Screen – Ericsson T68
• Camera – Sharp GX10
• Touch-screen - Ericsson R380
• WiFi - Nokia 9500
• GPS – Benefon Esc!
  
• Java -Siemens SL45i
  
• 3G – Motorola A830
  
• Polyphonic ringtones - Alcatel One Touch 511
  

Footnote - As I very quickly found out, there is no one single resource which has all this information, so the list has been cobbled together from a range of sources, including, but not limited to:

http://www.mobiles.co.uk/mobile-phone-history-uk.html

http://www.gsmarena.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_features

http://www.umtsworld.com/umts/history.htm

The list is correct to the best of my knowledge, but if you reckon I’ve got anything wrong, please let me know in the comments section below.

UPDATE - 22/05/09

Thanks to this excellent blog post about handset design, I have discovered the Benefon Esc! - which had GPS way before the Nokia N95 (by about 7 years). I’ve updated the list to reflect this.