06 Dec Mobile Phones

Where were you in 1992? If you had a mobile phone back then, chances are that, like Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street, you needed two hands to hold the device to your ear. Yesterday’s cell phones not only looked like cordless landline phones, they lacked most functions of modern phones—except, of course, the ability to make a call. Many came with exorbitantly priced plans that were out of reach for everyday consumers.

These days, 70 percent of the world’s population has some sort of mobile device. Cell phones come equipped with GPS-reliant maps, built-in high-resolution cameras with  color filters and video settings, and enough storage space to take most of your digital music library on the road. Because there’s almost nothing a modern mobile phone can’t do, many busy women on the go wonder how they ever got anything done before the invention of smartphone apps and the ubiquity of wireless Internet and Bluetooth. Here’s a quick look at how the all-in-one cell phones of today compared with their predecessors.

Did you know?

What is thought to be the first text message was sent in December 1992. In 2011, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that American adults send or receive an average of 41.5 text messages per day. Worldwide, several trillion are now sent each year.