What's Happened In Mobile Over the Past 10 Years

andylim writes "recombu.com has an article examining what's happened in mobile over the past ten years, including BlackBerry launching its first smart phone in 2002, Motorola launching the Razr in 2004 and Apple launching the iPhone in 2007. As a commenter points out, the first camera phone (Sharp J-SH04), which was released in 2000, featured a 110,000-pixel (0.11MP) CMOS image sensor, and a 256-colour (8 bit) display."

Comments

Hmm

[Achromatic1978]

An article? Hah. More like "ten bulletpoints that will take you a good 20-30 seconds to skim, but get us several ad impressions", including "insights" such as:

2003 The Windows Mobile brand is launched with Windows Mobile 2003. Windows Mobile is widely used by businesses to do work on the move.

Wow. Or:

2005 Sony Ericsson launches a superb new camera phone called the K750i and a great music phone called the W800i. These two handsets establish Sony Ericsson as a serious consumer player.

Awesome. Just awesome. If you think there's more depth than this, there's not. That is the sum total of the analysis of those two years.

Notable hardware

[ickleberry]

This deserves a mention, the legendary Nokia 6310i still has a thriving refurb market to this day. That thing is probably the highest quality mainstream phone ever made. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/12/20/nokia_breakthrough_phone/

3G (UMTS) turned out to be a bit of a disappointment with the required cell density there are only a few 3G-only networks in densely populated places like South Korea, 2G GSM is likely to stay around well into the LTE era.

Satellite phone networks have also come a long way since the initial bankruptcies and unreliable services. There are now at least 4 Geosynchronous orbit satellite phone networks with handheld phones and the two LEO networks that went bankrupt both recovered and are planning to launch new satellites. The phones themselves also not half the size they used to be.

Re:In other news...

[segin]

Well, what can you expect with a camera with a single fixed aperture and speed? Almost every cell phone camera out there is f/2.8, although if you are (un)lucky, you might get one with f/5.6. Whatever the aperture is, however, is what you are stuck with, for the most part (unless you are a super-wiz hardware hacker and can replace most of the camera...).

The second factor in determining image quality is shutter speed, but since in this day and age, there is no physical shutter, "shutter speed" refers to how long the image sensor senses for image data; 1/400 shutter speed on a cell phone means that, actually, the sensor is only "looking" at the world for 1/400 of a second. While this is quite similar to a real camera, the fact that the sensor is "always exposed" means that it is always at odds with the world, in terms of lighting (being left camera-side up on a sunny day is not good for the phone's camera at all)

So yes, megapixels don't mean shit. A decent camera with an adjustable aperture and shutter speed (possibly even a real shutter) makes for a better picture.

Re:In other news...

[Rakshasa Taisab]

And most countries, particularly much of the European ones, have the advantage of having higher population density and smaller area. Even in countries like Albania (which I doubt has much for any connectivity) getting the whole country covered with modern data cellular would be much easier.

Worth mentioning is that the countries in Europe furthest ahead in cellular technology, the Scandinavian countries, have very low population density even when compared to the US. And still they have coverage in pretty much all of the country. (Including many remote mountainous regions)