Special Report: Evolution of the mobile phone

Today (April 3rd) the mobile phone celebrates it's 40th anniversary, we take a look back at the evolution of the mobile phone.

This is the first ever commercially available mobile phone. It's the Motorola DynaTac 800x, launched in 1983. It cost around $4000 and had a battery life of just 30 minutes (calling time), although took 10 hours to fully charge up.

Jump forward 9 years to 1992 and here you have the Nokia 1011. It's considerably more compact than the motorola and it was the first phone to use the GSM (instead of Radio) system.

Motorola StarTAC- the first real flip phone which also had GSM. Based on startreck, this phone was the first ever to really get to consumers with over 60 million handsets sold all together. Although, it was still quite expensive at $1000.

Next is the Nokia 5110. It came in different colours along with the extremely popular game "snake", this was one of the most popular phones of all time. It went on sale on 1998 until 2001 and was extremely rugged and also had a very good battery life.

Two years later after Nokia finished selling the 5110, Motorola launched the first ever phone to come with 3G. This meant that, along with the front facing camera, you could do video calling. However this feature never really took off, and people still don't tend to use video calling now- although skype and facetime apps on phones have made it a lot easier and it is growing in popularity.

Later on in 2003, the first ever Blackberry was launched: the 6210. It was originally aimed at the business market and was one of the first to feature a full QWERTY keyboard and could easily recieve e-mail messages.

In 2005, Nokia launched the N70. This was a powerful smartphone (for it's day) with a front facing camera and large screen. It was also the first phone to introduce the use of apps, games and programmes which it could easily handle.

Two years later on and Apple decide to get involved in the smartphone market- with a phone that would shake the whole market. The iPhone was announced in 2007 and brought with it the smartphone revolution. With it apps became mainstream, touch screen became the norm and phones would never be the same again. The iPhone is now on it's 5th generation.

Now we have a whole range of new phones which are influenced by the iPhone. For example the HTC one, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and The Nokia Lumia range.