The Mobile Web

The Evolution of the Mobile Phone

In this lecture we explored the evolution of the mobile phone. From simply devices which their sole task was to act as a portable home phone to today's multi-touch, multi-connected (time wasting) devices.

Some notable mobile phones in history:

• Motorola Dynatac 8000X (1983) - The first portable mobile phone
• Motorola Microtac 9800X (1989) - The first truly portable mobile phone, now featuring an address book, and the first flip-phone
• Nokia 5110 (1998) - First mainstream mobile phone, featuring some in-built games and a 5 inch display
• Nokia 3310 (2000) - Hugely popular phone with T9
• Motorola RAZR (2004) - Hugely popular phone that set the standard for stylish and fashionable phones to come
• Apple iPhone (2007) - Touch-screen goes mainstream, auto-rotation, integrated Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS

---

The Evolution of Mobile Phone Connectivity

Technology	Standards	Year Introduced	Data Rates
1G	AMPS, TACS	1983	-
2G	GSM, CDMA, EDGE, GPRS	1991	236 kbps
3G	UTMS, CDMA, HSDPA	2001	384 kbps
4G	LTE, WiMax	2009	< 1 Gbps

Throughout the years, mobile phone began garnering more and more connectivity options, apart from the phone connectivity itself. Some of these technologies are:

• Infra-Red - significant reduction in phones equipped with this technology
• FM-Radio
• Bluetooth
• GPS
• WiFi

From the early days of WAP to the mainstream introduction of WiFi in our mobile phones, accessing the web on our phones has been long coming. In the WAP days, only specially designed pages could be accessed from our phones. Today, we can access the full-blown internet on our phones. The preferred practice though is to adapt our page for mobile access. Adapting for mobile access means that the page will fit snugly on the user's screen, eliminating side scrolling and zooming to read items. Providing sizeable buttons and click-able areas are also issues taken into consideration.

---

GeoLocation - where are you?

In conjunction with mobile phone development we explored the GeoLocation API. This API makes use of already known locations, such as cell phone towers and WiFi and uses them as reference points (triangulation) to determine your approximate location. After writing a bit of code, as shown below, to call the GeoLocation API, I tested it on a few browsers. Internet Explorer 9 failed to show anything. Firefox 4 took a good half a minute to get the location and was sometimes reporting errors. Opera and Google Chrome on the other hand, worked as they should.