The Telephone

It probably wasn't technically the world's first call to be made from a handheld mobile phone, but romantic history has it that Motorola's Martin Cooper grabbed his shiny new, double-brick-sized DynaTAC prototype while walking the streets of New York and Dialled the number of rival engineer Joel Engel, Bell Labs' head of research.

Although this landmark event took place on 3 April 1973, it took Motorola another 10 years to launch the first commercial version of the groundbreaking gadget. In 1983, a $4000 priced DynaTAC 8000X hit the market sporting a much slimmer figure than its prototype - starting the ongoing trend of handset miniaturisation. It had a talk time of 35 minutes, while recharging the battery took more than 10 hours.

The origins of cellular technology can be traced back to 1947, when Bell Labs DH Ring proposed the use of hexagonal cells to form an interconnected network of transceiver base stations. In 1970, another Bell Labs' engineer (Amos Joel) invented a call handover method that allowed mobile phones (such as Ericsson's 9kg MTB unit) to maintain an active call while moving from one cell to another.

1n 1992, Finnish mobile phone operator Oy Radiolinga Ab went live with Europe's first GSM network. Meanwhile, annual world-wide mobile phone shipments during 2006 surpassed the one billion mark, making it one of the fastest growing technology products of the past 15 years. ¿ Melissa Fox