The+Cellphone+Platform

Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks
In the 1980s, a cellphone was the size of a brick and weighed about as much. It was basically a walkie-talkie with you on one end and an operator on the other. Eventually, DTMF features (the tone you you hear when you press a key) were added, allowing automated integration with the regular telephone system. Eventually, the technology progressed to the point where a cellphone was basically a landline phone without the landline. After the initial development phase came digital upgrades. When the phone system went digital in the early 2000s, it marked the first step towards the technologies we see integrated into cellphones today. Text messaging and data transfer became possible, and along with those came the internet and e-mail. Eventually, other features were added such as picture messaging, streaming multimedia, and GPS to create what we know of cellphones today. They have evolved greatly from the brickphones of the '80s.

Some of the new "tricks" cellphones were able to "learn" included Facebook integration, two-way private trunk radio (the [|iDEN] system) and GPS navigation. The most amazing part of cellphone development over the past decade has been the fact that technologies out into these phones aren't even new technologies at all, just existing technologies that have been repurposed to do other tasks. For example, dialup internet consists of a phone that sends data instead of voice. A cellphone sends voice, so it can send data over the same phone link. This was the first step towards getting the internet on the cellphone, and therefore the first step to integrating all the fun things that come with the internet like instant messaging, Facebook, and Flash technology.