Motorola had long produced mobile telephones for cars that were large and heavy and consumed too much power to allow their use without the automobile's engine running. Mitchell's team, which included Martin Cooper, developed portable cellular telephony, and Mitchell was among the Motorola employees granted a patent for this work in 1973; the first call on the prototype was completed, reportedly, to a wrong number. [7] Miller, Stephen (20 June 2009). "Motorola Executive Helped spur Cellphone Revolution, Oversaw Ill-fated Iridium Project". The Wall Street Journal.

In September 2007, the Open Mobile Terminal Platform group (a forum of mobile network operators and manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG) announced that its members had agreed on Micro-USB as the future common connector for mobile devices. [60] [61] Lane, Clare (17 June 2009). "John F. Mitchell, 1928–2009: Was president of Motorola from 1980 to '95". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on 6 July 2009 . Retrieved 29 July 2009. With the removal of analog network cells nearly all over the world, the DynaTAC models running on AMPS or other analog networks are mostly obsolete. Thus, they are more collectors' items than usable telephones. The International series, however, will still work, but only on GSM 900 cells.It employed some of the technology previously used in the ALOHAnet system, including metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) transceiver and modem technology. [17] Variants [ edit ] In the United States, engineers from Bell Labs began work on a system to allow mobile users to place and receive telephone calls from automobiles, leading to the inauguration of mobile service on 17 June 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri. Shortly after, AT&T offered Mobile Telephone Service. A wide range of mostly incompatible mobile-telephone services offered limited coverage areas and only a few available channels in urban areas. As calls were transmitted as unencrypted analog signals, anyone with radio equipment that could receive those frequencies could eavesdrop. The commercial introduction (in Japan in 1979) of cellular technology, which allowed re-use of frequencies many times in small adjacent areas covered by relatively low-powered transmitters, made widespread adoption of mobile telephones economically feasible. All these were put in place to allow for low latency, low bit rate communications such as VoIP. [49] In 1966 Norway had a system called OLT which was manually controlled. Finland's ARP, launched in 1971, was also manual as was the Swedish MTD. All were replaced by the automatic NMT, (Nordic Mobile Telephone) system in the early 1980s. In the five years from 1985 to 1990, Nokia and Ericsson joined Motorola as well as electronics giants NEC and Philips and a host of

Gopal, Thawatt (11–15 March 2007). "EVDO Rev. A Control Channel Bandwidth Analysis for Paging". IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference. IEEE. pp.3262–3267. doi: 10.1109/WCNC.2007.601. ISBN 978-1-4244-0658-6. While smartphones are all screen, these basic phones need space for the keyboard and the display is much smaller. In 1991 the first GSM network ( Radiolinja) launched in Finland. In general the frequencies used by 2G systems in Europe were higher than those in the United States, though with some overlap. For example, the 900MHz frequency range was used for both 1G and 2G systems in Europe, so the 1G systems were rapidly closed down to make space for the 2G systems. In the United States, the IS-54 standard was deployed in the same band as AMPS and displaced some of the existing analog channels. While the transmission of speech by signal has a long history, the first devices that were wireless, mobile, and also capable of connecting to the standard telephone network are much more recent. The first such devices were barely portable compared to today's compact hand-held devices, and their use was clumsy. Wireless Phone Cases Dismissed". San Francisco Call. Vol.104, no.37. 7 July 1908 . Retrieved 21 October 2013– via California Digital Newspaper Collection.

O2, Vodafone and EE all offer a 2G service for calls and text messages, but Three doesn’t. Three is also switching off its 3G network in 2024 and Vodafone will retire its 3G by early 2024.