Chris Mares
Management Information Systems 3358_601
December 02, 2012
Term Paper
The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the emerging technology with new cell phones and along with that technology the trends that accompany that new technology. Every year there seems to be a new development toward cell phones and what they can accomplish. The evolution of the cell phone has been tremendous the past few years as it feels like we can do more and more with our cell phones. I would like to break down some of the actual technology that has inspired some of the recent updates to many of our “smart phones” and so the trends that tend to follow those technology enhancements.
Before I discuss the present and the future I would like to look at the past and history of not just cell phones but phones in general. It started back in the year 1865 when Doctor Mahlon Loomis became the first person to be able to communicate wirelessly. Loomis came up with the thought of transmitting and receiving messages though the atmosphere as a conductor. In 1947 Douglas Ring and W. Rae. Young proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones. They proposed that cell towers which are multi-directional antenna arrays be at the corners of hexagons rather than the centers so they could transmit and receive in there directions. In the few years that followed due to the limitations on technology a mobile phone had to stay within the coverage area that was serviced by one base station throughout the phone call and there was no continuity of service as phones would pass through different cell phone areas. Then in 1970 Bell Labs invented a system referred to as an automatic call handoff system that allowed mobile phones to be able to move through several cell phone areas within a single conversation without any disturbance. Then a few years later, led by Dr. Martin Cooper and his team the Motorola DynaTac 8000X which was an analog mobile phone system was developed and introduced to the public. It was often referred to as “The Brick” because of its size and weight. A version of the phone was made famous when used by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie “Wall Street” which at the time symbolized technology, power, and money because of the rareness of cellular phones at the time. It then made a cameo appearance in the 2010 follow up “Wall Street Money Never Sleeps” in which the Michael Douglas’s character comes out of jail after many years and is given back the phone. It symbolizes in the movie how far down he has fallen, but for cell phones it goes to show just how much they have changed in the past 20 plus years alone.
In 2007 cell phones and the world as we know it was forever changed with the introduction of the first iphone. Steve Jobs who was the CEO at Apple at the time had conceived an idea of using a multi-touch screen to interact with a computer by bypassing the need for a physical mouse and keyboard making this tablet style computer into a phone which was unprecedented at the time. Apple had created the device during collaboration with a few wireless companies. The original iphone hardware and software was all developed in house. When Jobs first introduced the phone, he stated that “today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” The device would have a combination of three devices: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a “revolutionary mobile phone”; and “breakthrough Internet communicator”. In its initial release the iPhone was running on what was referred to as “OS X”. With the original release the operating system had Visual Voicemail, mulit-touch gestures, HTML email capabilities, Safari web browser, threaded text messaging, and You Tube. In the initial release there were some features like MMS, apps, and copy and paste that were not included. There were hackers that would add such features to the phone; this was known as “jailbreaking”. The iPhone has since become
