January 14, 2013 • 29 mins
Was there really a smartphone in a silent film from the 1920s? Who created the first cell phone? What exactly is a PDA? Join Lauren and Jonathan as they explore the origins of cell phones and smartphones in the first part of this two-part series.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from House Stuff.
Hi there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan
Strickland and I'm Lauren, and today we wanted to talk
a little bit about the history of smartphones, and before
we really get into it, I thought we'd probably dive
(00:23):
just a bit into our own personal history with smartphones. Lauren,
do you own a smartphone? I do, in fact on
a smartphone. Gosh, Lauren, what kind of smartphone do you own?
I have an iPhone for okay, so iPhone for one
of the very popular models out there. I actually have
an iPhone four as well, though I use mine as
an iPod touch because it's a hand me down. My
(00:43):
wife has an iPhone five. She loves it. She and
Syrie have nice long conversations of which I get to
take no part. But I also do have my own
legitimate smartphone, legitimate and that it's actually connected to a
cellular network, because my phone is not. I have an
Android phone HTCG two to be precise, which was the
(01:06):
successor to the HTCG one that'll come in handy later.
But uh I was a late adopter to the smartphone
UH model, as first by late adopter. Yes, do you
mean before two eleven, because because that's when I adopted
the smartphone. Yeah. Yeah, And as we'll see, that was
that was fairly late, uh, considering when smartphones first started
(01:29):
to hit the market. But then I was also a
late adopter to cell phones in general. I was one
of those curmudgeons who said, why would I need a
phone so people can get in touch with me whenever?
That's what answering machines are for. Uh, because get off
my lawn. But I thought we'd talk about the history,
and also we need to kind of define what a
smartphone is in general, because that's changed over time a
(01:52):
whole bunch, that's right. These these days, I think it's
basically defined as um, something that has apps that you
can download so that you can change what software is
on your phone personally. Yeah, exactly, very true. And in
the past that was it was more just kind of
a combination of a cellphone and p d A at
the same time. Yeah. Yeah, some basic features that made
(02:12):
it more than just a device that could let you
call on the go, but let you send messages in
various ways or or even serve the web. So a
lot of the stuff that we would we would think
of as a feature phone was originally what we would
call a smartphone, because a feature phone now is pretty
much anything that's not a smartphone, apart from, you know,
a brick that makes calls. But to really understand how
(02:36):
smartphones evolved, um, well, we started talking about the history
of it, and we realized that we kind of had
to go a little further back than smartphones or cell
phones or telephones because but essentially a smartphone is is
it is a telephone that is mobile, and what what
a mobile telephone is is technically a radio. Um, so
(02:57):
you go all the way back to what was six
Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah, that's alex as I like to
call him. Yeah, he came up with this idea. He
called it the electrical speech machine, and uh in eighteen
seventy six. And before him, there had been a lot
of work in physics for discovering things like the nature
of electromagnetism and how that could create certain waves, and
(03:20):
there was a there had also been development of a
thing called the telegraph, which was I know, nuts, right,
but I can send messages across distance, yeah, exactly, and
you don't have to use a horse or smoke or
a horse that's smoking. It's awesome. So yeah, the the
at this point we're talking about actually transmitting voice over electricity,
(03:43):
which was a phenomenal idea. And uh, the nice thing
about this is that you're looking at these different disciplines
that kind of combined to say, you know, there's probably
the potential to make a wireless communications system. We've figured
out how to do it by wire. We've got this
other work that physicists are doing in electromagnetism and radio waves.
(04:04):
I bet that we can figure out this this relationship
between electricity voice electromagnetism, make it work in some crazy
way to transmit voice across great distances without wires. And
there are a few people who are thinking of crazy
thoughts like that. Uh Marconi, he was one of them.
Kind of big, yeah, kind of big. There was the
(04:25):
internet Darling Tesla. Yeah yeah, when you say his name,
doves fly out of the internet. Uh yeah. While he
did make some amazing discoveries and was a phenomenal physicist
in his day, also was a crazy, crazy man. He
is his his picture is looking at us from the
podcast wall right now, staring staring deeply into me and
(04:48):
judging me. That might also be my I get a
little grouchy with Tesla. Edison also very important during this
time up by the way, that's your queue taboo. You
cheer Tesla and you boo Edison. That how the internet works. Well,
he killed elephants. He did kill elephants. That's true. He
used alternating current to shock elephants to death. But we're
(05:09):
kind of getting off base anyway. At this point, we're
talking about radio. So now radio, of course plays an
important part because when you get to the point of
cellular telephones, you're really talking about another version of radio communication.
So you've got the the development of the telephone and
the development of radio all going on at the same time. Uh.
And then we'll skip ahead a little bit because although
(05:29):
there are lots and lots of things we can talk
about during this time, ultimately they don't really uh inform
our discussion about the history of the smartphone. I would
go all the way to oh, I'm I'm actually not
familiar with this, with this particular reference that ves wireless
even wireless. Okay, so there's actually a clip online where
(05:50):
you can watch this silent film. And I did not
know about this until this morning. So I don't think
that I'm brilliant because I put this in our notes.
I just found out about it a thought it was
too cool to pass up because I was looking around
and someone jokingly referred to it as the first smartphone.
It's a silent film that shows two women walking down
the street having a conversation, or at least that's what
(06:12):
we assume they're doing, because we can't hear them. They
could be making bird noises for all I know. They
come up to a fire hydrant, and as two women
in the early twentieth century would do, they stop at
the fire hydrant. Clearly, of course, they wrap a wire
around the end of the fire hydrant and they and
(06:32):
the other end of that wires holds up to a radio.
And then there's another wire from the radio going to
an umbrella, which one of the two ladies opens up
and holds up into the air. And then they fiddle
with some knobs on the radio that is now wired
to both the umbrella and the fire hydranydrant. And then
it cuts with the magic of cinema to a radio
(06:55):
operator who is holding up a transmitter to a phonograph
and plays music from the phonograph through the radio transmitter,
which the two ladies on the street are apparently listening
to the umbrella. And yes, yes, so this was this
was what people were calling the first smartphone because it
was using wireless radio technology to transmit communications exactly. I
(07:20):
like to think of it as the first iPod commercial.
But yeah, that's why I put that in there, because
someone jokingly referred to it as the first smartphone, which
really it only had one way communication. You can only receive.
There was not a transmitter, right, they didn't have a
microphone waked up to it exactly. Certainly that was going
to be in the sequel. Yes, yes, it was Eve's
Witness to the Reckoning. Um did not yet did not
(07:44):
do well the box office, sadly. That's why I had
to put that in there, just because the clip is online,
and I'll share a clip of that in our Facebook
page so you guys can get a look at it
because it's it's entertaining, It sounds spectacular. If this were
not audio, then I would want to play it right now.
Uh no, But but we we had some actual mobile
call technology going on by the correct that's correct. You
(08:08):
got a T and T and bell Labs now Bell Labs,
is the research and development arm of a T and
T correct and Bell Labs very much known for developments
in wireless communication as well just communication technology in general.
So in the nineteen forties they developed the first wireless network,
and that's kind of being generous, Uh what was it?
(08:32):
What was it like? Back in so imagine that you
are in a big metropolis and your big metropolis has
a wireless network that consists of a single tower with
a transmitter on it, and that transmitter is capable of
handling oh maybe a dozen channels of communication, so that's
(08:53):
all it could handle at one time. So in other words,
even if you had a lot of people with the handsets,
you could have of them actually operated simultaneous or maybe
even just six because I don't know if it was
too like it was two ways, but I honestly don't
know because I didn't have enough information there. But but
the the first wireless call was made by a truck driver,
(09:14):
showing that even back in the nineteen forties we were
not practicing safe driving techniques. And it was a hand
set like like a rotary phone. Hands do you know
what a rotary phone is? Lauren? I remember rotary phones
from when I was about three. Lauren's a little younger
than I am, so, so the rotary phone handle, it's
this giant handle, right, and it's got like a cord
(09:35):
that goes down to the base unit of this wireless telephone.
And how how large was the based unit of a
wireless telephone? Well, I don't have the specific dimensions, but
I can tell you it weighed eighty pounds and for
our friends who used the metric systems, thirty six point
three kilograms. So not exactly fit in your pocket mobile,
(09:56):
not so much something that you want to want to
take around with you, you know, I mean vacations. I
assume it's camera was really crappy, Yeah, terrible. Yeah, yeah,
a zero megapixel camera, right. Yeah. The only app could
I could run is call this person, and that's only
if you dialed it. Um. Yeah, eighty pounds. Yeah. If
Steve Jobs had come out in two thousand and seven
(10:17):
and unveiled the iPhone and it weighed eighty pounds, I
doubt it would have done quite so well on the market. Yeah,
not so much, but for those purposes. Yeah, and it
cost fifteen dollars a month to have the service which
if you were to do an inflation calculator as I did,
which had the latest year as eleven, that's the most
recent figure, but in the fifteen dollars a month would
(10:39):
be a hundred thirty eight dollars a month, which which actually, yeah,
that I would take that today. Yeah, that's actually lower
than what I'm paying. Although although I suppose that, yeah,
that that that eighty pounds of lugging equipment around is
maybe well, I would also be in better shape. I
wouldn't need to download any physical fitness apps to my phone,
because just carrying the phone would be physical fitness. Maybe
(11:01):
maybe we need to bring back the eighty pound phones.
Maybe maybe this is this will solve the oats any traffic.
If any of our listeners out there launch a company
where you market an eighty pound smartphone, we demand at
least some sort of residuals because we ain't getting rich
from podcasts and folks. Also a prototype send one over.
Yeah okay, So moving on, we get to nine. Now
(11:27):
this is where we start seeing companies look into developing
cellular networks. So going beyond that single transmitter model I
was just talking about. Now we're looking at building the
foundation that would allow people to make sell calls. Right,
and by cellular, of course, we mean a telephone that
can go through a network of towers and keep the
(11:49):
signal exactly, yes, because that's a that would be an issue.
If you were to move outside the broadcast range of
a transmitter and a receiver, then you would drop your call.
So if you have a network of these transmitters and receivers,
then the theoretically you can move from one to the
other and you'd be fine, but you'd have to figure
out how to coordinate. Yeah, you gotta you gotta build
(12:10):
the architecture so that the phone when it moves from
one to the other, gets handed off from one tower
to another tower, or a communication ceases. This is not
a trivial problem, and it will take many decades of
work and and lots of infrastructure goes into it. And
uh yeah, and so so even though we technically had
the capacity to make these calls, to make these mobile
(12:32):
calls back in the nineties, we would not have the
infrastructure to do so. I mean, I mean, I guess
it started in right, Yeah, No, you're exactly right. Even today,
I mean, certain parts of Atlanta we drive through and
I'm just like you can you gehit that dead section?
There's a section on okay, And I apologize to all
the people who are going to hear the pronunciation of
this street, but this is how we say it in Atlanta.
Ponstall le in when you go downstall. I'm sorry, it's
(12:55):
not pomps Own, which is what how my wife pronounces it,
being from Philadelphia, she refuses to sleep in Florida. Yeah,
they can't. I'm a little bit physically incapable of saying it.
After after about eight years, I worked it out. It's
it's tough, but yeah, there are certain dead sections. Clearly,
we still have to keep building those networks out if
we want to have universal coverage across the United States. Um,
(13:16):
that sounds weird. Universal coverage across the United States Universal
if it's universal, doesn't make it international anyway. Moving on, so, so, yeah,
we're talking decades of work to build out the cellular networks,
which at the at that time, you know, no one
was using because there was there wasn't nothing networks, right,
it was physically impossible to crazy, Yeah, and it wasn't.
(13:38):
It wasn't in fact until the nineteen seventies that they
managed to pull off that first cellular call. It was yeah,
Martin Cooper. Okay, so this is a great, great story.
Martin Cooper and executive with Motorola. Are you imagine this?
You head up a research and development facility within Motorola. Sure, okay.
You know that you have uh uh peers in the
(14:01):
industry who are working on cellular networks at the same
time that your group is working on them. Yes, the
big one being Bell Labs of a T and T.
You and your team managed to make a cellular network
and a phone that will work on that network, and
you can make a call to anyone. Who is the
first person you call? My mom? I'm not sure. Well,
(14:26):
Martin Cooper decided to call the head of the research
and development team over at Bell Laboratories because the very
first cell phone call was a crank call. That is amazing.
Isn't that phenomenal? How many more cell phone calls would
follow in that wake? Did he ask if his refrigerator
wasning Prince Albert in a can? Actually I don't think
(14:47):
he did any of that, but but yes, the famously,
he very cheekily made a phone call to the two
executive over at Bell Labs which was kind of tweaking
their nose at the same time as having this historic
moment on that phone was also a little a little clunky.
It was not eighty pounds, but it was about one
point seven five pounds, which is around point eight krams.
(15:08):
And it had a cute nickname Brick, which you know, obviously,
if if I saw a phone marketed as the Brick,
I'm just thinking, boy, I gotta get my hands on
that thing. Oh yeah, oh yeah, the eyebricks. Canna get
the lead weight too, that would be awesome. So but
this this obviously showed a shift in telephone technology. It
(15:30):
would still be quite a few years before cell phones
became a common thing in the consumer market, but we
started to see them get adopted for advanced users, for
business users probably yep. We also those first adopters, those
early adopters who would like to be on the bleeding
edge of technology before it's even proven. They would go
(15:51):
out and get one. They were really expensive, they were
not very um practical, but this was the beginning of
that that trend. Um. Now, the next thing I have
here is nineteen seventy four, and uh, ladies and gentlemen
of Greek ancestry. I would like to apologize profusely for
what I am about to attempt, because nineteen seventy four
(16:12):
was when Theodore George and here we go, Paris Cavacos,
that's my best guest. Paris Scovaco said, it's a Greek name,
so obviously I probably have butchered it. But he patented
a concept. Uh he actually he submitted the patent in
nineteen seventy two, but in seventy four he was granted
the patent for a concept for what would be a
(16:34):
or an early smartphone, and I wasn't called that at
the time. Of course, it was called an apparatus for
generating and transmitting digital information. Smartphone is catchier. I see,
I see why that one stuck. Although I would say, Lauren,
you you're familiar somewhat with the the realm of the
steampunk a little bit, I would think that steampunk fans
(16:55):
what they really need to do is just go through
and look at patent titles, because every patent title is
really more of a description of what the device does.
And if you've ever seen anyone who creates steampunk gadgets,
that's almost always what they name their stuff. It's not
a simple name. It's a descriptor. It's as many words
as you can possibly fit into a single phrase without
(17:17):
losing your breath and falling over. And the word ether
has to be in there somewhere. Well clearly, yeah, I
mean obviously it's the most important part. Also, don't forget
your goggles. Uh, that's neither here nor there. Moving on,
so so so in in seventy four, um um, our friend,
our friend Teddy. Yeah I like that. Yes, Teddy put
in this patent um and then proceeded to do absolutely
(17:38):
nothing with it. Is that correct? Well? Yeah, I mean
it kind of just sort of languished because while the
concept was there, the technology wasn't really up to task
to fulfilling on that promise. Because the idea was to
have this handheld device that could transmit digital information at
the time in the in the handheld device would not
(18:01):
really be able to do that efficiently. We're talking about
I mean, we were in nineteen seventy four. I'm again,
you would be more familiar with this because you were ancient. Um,
but I was not born in seventy four. Thank you,
I don't have to wait a year. But yes, yes,
hand handheld devices at the time could could do not
very calculating. We had some, We had some We had
(18:24):
some really good graphics calculators first starting around the around
the seventies. Yeah, Hewett Packard had some some calculators and
IBM of you as well. But they were more than
the size of our laptops. They were closer to that
than a than a slider phone, definitely. And in nineteen
seventy four, you're also talking about this is this is
right at the very bleeding edge of the personal computer.
(18:46):
Are so a smartphone, which in a way is like
a a a distant cousin of the PC that fits
in your hand. Clearly, it would be unreasonable to think
of something like that existing in seventy four when the
actual PC still itself was not much, not really a thing.
Yet you have to wait another couple of years for
those to become a thing. So when when did when did? Um?
(19:08):
I mean because one of the ancestors of smartphones had
to have been p D a Personal Digital assistance which
which came onto the scene in the early eighties, Is
that correct? So there's this company called Scion, and that's
going to become important in a little bit too. Ssion
created this device called the organizer. Now, the first organizer
was more of a curiosity. It was part calculator, part
(19:31):
database manager, or part part like digital note taker. So
imagine that you have a watch that also lets you
type stuff in it, but you can't do anything else
with the stuff, so you can make it just sits
in the watch forever. Right, Yeah, you could delete it eventually.
I think they had to use Actually I don't think
(19:51):
it's this one, but there is one p d A
I read about where the only way to reformat it
was to bathe it an ultra violet radiation, which, of course,
I mean I have one of those devices at home.
So yeah, the dogs love it. I'm kidding, I'm kidding,
they hate it. So yeah, the the organizer, all it
was was a clock in this a way of taking notes.
(20:14):
But you couldn't you couldn't organize it in any other way. Really,
it was like you could put I could put down
your name and your phone number, and then under on
the next line under I might put eggs, milk, bread,
you know, et cetera. And then on the next line
down I might say, um, you know, write down what
a person's address, And there's there's no rhyme or reason.
There wasn't there was no particular operating system, right. But
(20:37):
one just two years later they introduced the organizer too,
and that one was really the very first pd eight
had a lot more features that actually had allowed you
to organize stuff into different categories, and it laid the
groundwork for what the p d A would be over
the next really the next decade and a half. P
d a's, I mean they technically still exist, but mostly
(20:59):
they've been co opted by smartphones. It's one of those
many things that we have replaced in our pockets with
a single We went from so we went from seventy
four to eight four. What's our next jump? I think
our next jump is all the way to ninety four. Yeah,
we'd like to take these decades people. Um, And that
was that was when that was the first time that
(21:20):
that a p d A and a cell phone really
got got kind of smooshed together. Right, Yeah, So what
IBM dead? It was IBM IBM took a PDA and
they took a cell phone, and they put them in
a room together and put on some very white music.
And about nine months later, the Simon Personal Communicator came
out and that's how smartphones are born. Actually that's mostly
(21:41):
a lie, but no, they did. They did come up
with a product called the Simon Personal Communicator, and yeah,
it was part cell phone, part p d A. So
in a way it's the kind of like the great
grandfather of smartphones. And it could send facsimiles. Is that correct, Verry?
What wasn't that one of the first messages that it sent.
I believe during one of their their stage shows they
(22:01):
sent a facts from one end of the stage to
the other and we're like, check us out you yeah,
which is at that time that was pretty exciting certainly,
and you know, it's it's hard for us to remember now,
but for all, remember all those you know, all those
hoax emails or jokes you would get an email and
then later on you would start getting them on things
like Facebook. My very dear grandmother still still uses email
(22:22):
to send them. Yeah, so you get those forwards. Back
in the day, which was a Thursday, remember, uh, we
used to send those via facts. They're called facts lure.
Facts Laura is a type of folklore where the same
sort of hoaxes and jokes would get passed around on
facts as they do today. On email or through social networks,
(22:43):
and so very important to allow people to pass on
that message that Bill Gates will give them lots of
money if they forward this message on which it's not
true critical but but yeah, and it was, it was,
I mean relatively tremendously expensive at the time, the sign
and um, it was it cost it cost a thousand
(23:03):
ninety nine dollars um by itself or a contract because
even then even then didn't when they're working with Bill
cell I think, um they had teamed up with Bell
Seal to do this. Who wasn't entirely sure about this
whole cell phone thing quite at that moment, the smartphone, right, Yeah,
I mean it was. It was a big risk at
(23:23):
that time. And even at that price, they still sold,
they still sold quite a few, uh products. Now granted
again these were going to very you know, a very
specialized market because not everyone could afford a well in
to day's dollars would be nearly more than sixteen hundred
dollars for a phone. Sixteen hundred dollars for a phone
for a phone. Yeah, but if you which is twice
(23:45):
what I would pay for anyone contract, And of course
I guess we should take this moment to also acknowledge
the fact to all of our listeners overseas who are
used to buying your phones without any subsidies from your
cell phone carrier. We totally understand the you you pay
more perfone than we do. But we're coming at it
from the perspective of people in the United States who
(24:06):
sign away two years of our lives in order to
be able to buy a phone for about four dollars
cheaper than what it would go for otherwise. We we
have to make a blood OAF but it only costs
about two hundred dollars to the phone, and somehow it
works out. Yeah, there's there's usually some sort of weird
ceremony involved, but two guys over there don't need to
know all about that. We don't want to give away
all our secrets. But so, but so, the Simon, the
Simon Personal Communicator, really I kind of didn't do well.
(24:29):
I don't think it was it was a few thousand,
but you know, it was like it was tet and
it was kind of a prototype. And and again the
infrastructure was not prepared to handle something like that. There
weren't that many places that you could use it. Yeah,
and and for for something that was based on a
concept of you can use this anywhere that wasn't really
it was it was, and so I think it was
(24:49):
off the market. It was. It was definitely one of
more of a proof of concept. That's why it turned out.
It turned out to be more of a proof of
concept that it turned out to be a useful product
on and so one because of those very things you say,
because yeah, I mean if if your whole thing is
this is mobile, then you better be able to use
it MOBI. Yeah. Apart from like it's mobile, as long
(25:13):
as you stay within this four square foot area of
this part of the office that's adjacent to this giant window,
that's not terribly useful. No no, um. But But but
very soon after that, in nineties six, Palms started Yeah Palm,
man boy, what a And we've done an episode about Palm,
a couple of episodes about Palm and including it's a
(25:34):
relationship with other companies. But in ninety six that's when
it started to really make a name for itself in
the personal Digital assistant UH market. And they released the
Pilot one thousand and Pilot five thousand, and people who
owned Palm p D as are some of the most
passionate technology lovers I know, oh absolutely. I mean there
I know people who still will talk about either their
(25:56):
PDA or their Palm. Smartphones, like the Trio owners are like, well,
they're like a mega owners. And I don't mean that
in a bad way. I just mean that they are
really passionate about that product. Right, Yes, absolutely, and it's
it's easy to see why. I mean it was. It
was very exciting at the time that the level of
functionality that they were getting out of out of a
(26:17):
thing that you could put in your pocket and carry
around with you and have have access to um all
sorts of stuff. Man, I mean you could have all
your calendar in there, you could have files, you could
even run apps on these things. It was. It was
a small, portable, very limited computer. Yes, go just another
(26:37):
year and then you know, there's this company that pops
up in n called HTC. Now I'm going to tell
you a story here, Lauren. You guys out there you
can listen in if you like HTC. I had never
heard of HTC because I was not into smartphones at
all until I got until first, and so I didn't
(27:00):
that's actually right. It came out in two thousand eight,
but I didn't buy my until two thousand nine. So
that's really remarkable that you knew that that Lauren's been stalking. Anyway,
I've been listening to your other podcasts. You've talked about
this before, Jonathan. Fair enough, fair enough, So HTC. I
had never heard of them. I didn't realize that they had.
They were first founded, and in fact, they've had a
(27:21):
much longer association with smartphones than I was aware. When
I saw the g One, I naively thought, oh, this
must be like one of their first products, because I've
never heard of them before. Now that was due to
my ignorance, not due to HTC's UH success in the
the or lack thereof in in UH in the market.
In fact, we'll talk a little bit about some of
their other products in a in a bit. So, yeah,
(27:44):
HTC pops up on the scene and they become a
big name, although not they don't always have a smooth
sailing kind of relationship with the market either. HTC has
been having some issues over the last couple of years.
In fact, most most technology companies, I think are doing
a tiny bit of that here and there. You found
out the first use of the term smartphone. Yes. Um,
(28:06):
that also happened in it was attached to one of
Ericsson's phones, UM called the g S eight eight a
k a. The Penelope. Oh it's not Penelope, not Penalope. Man,
I've been saying it wrong all these years. Um, but yeah,
this this was this was basically a concept model. I
think only about two were ever produced. But um, but yes,
(28:27):
that was the first marketing package that had the word
smart and phone in conjunction. There was a space between them,
so clearly there was a lot of work to be
done in the marketing field. Deleting that space would take
two years, two years of hard work. You thought building
that cellular network was tough. Space is big yo, getting
(28:48):
rid of it. But yeah, yeah, and and and this
is this is where that the rest of our outline
is extremely crunched together. It's it's if I drew a
little picture and had to start making bendylines going all
over the place. Well, yeah, because up to now we've
been jumping like we were doing. We were doing fifty
year jumps for a while, then we got down to
ten year jumps. Now we're doing like two and pretty
(29:09):
soon we've got a whole bunch of stuff happening year
by year, year by year, a month by month. So, Lauren,
it turns out we had a lot to say about
the history of smartphones. We talk a lot. Yeah, So
it turned out to be so long that we're doing
something that it's not unusual for text stuff. We're splitting
it into two episodes, so we're gonna leave off here,
but we'll pick up in our next episode right where
(29:30):
we left off. If you guys have topics you would
like us to tackle on tech stuff, email us our
addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com or contact us
on Facebook or Twitter. Are handle us tech stuff, hs
W and Lauren and I will talk to you again
really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is its staff works dot com.
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from House Stuff.
Hi there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan
Strickland and I'm Lauren, and today we wanted to talk
a little bit about the history of smartphones, and before
we really get into it, I thought we'd probably dive
(00:23):
just a bit into our own personal history with smartphones. Lauren,
do you own a smartphone? I do, in fact on
a smartphone. Gosh, Lauren, what kind of smartphone do you own?
I have an iPhone for okay, so iPhone for one
of the very popular models out there. I actually have
an iPhone four as well, though I use mine as
an iPod touch because it's a hand me down. My
(00:43):
wife has an iPhone five. She loves it. She and
Syrie have nice long conversations of which I get to
take no part. But I also do have my own
legitimate smartphone, legitimate and that it's actually connected to a
cellular network, because my phone is not. I have an
Android phone HTCG two to be precise, which was the
(01:06):
successor to the HTCG one that'll come in handy later.
But uh I was a late adopter to the smartphone
UH model, as first by late adopter. Yes, do you
mean before two eleven, because because that's when I adopted
the smartphone. Yeah. Yeah, And as we'll see, that was
that was fairly late, uh, considering when smartphones first started
(01:29):
to hit the market. But then I was also a
late adopter to cell phones in general. I was one
of those curmudgeons who said, why would I need a
phone so people can get in touch with me whenever?
That's what answering machines are for. Uh, because get off
my lawn. But I thought we'd talk about the history,
and also we need to kind of define what a
smartphone is in general, because that's changed over time a
(01:52):
whole bunch, that's right. These these days, I think it's
basically defined as um, something that has apps that you
can download so that you can change what software is
on your phone personally. Yeah, exactly, very true. And in
the past that was it was more just kind of
a combination of a cellphone and p d A at
the same time. Yeah. Yeah, some basic features that made
(02:12):
it more than just a device that could let you
call on the go, but let you send messages in
various ways or or even serve the web. So a
lot of the stuff that we would we would think
of as a feature phone was originally what we would
call a smartphone, because a feature phone now is pretty
much anything that's not a smartphone, apart from, you know,
a brick that makes calls. But to really understand how
(02:36):
smartphones evolved, um, well, we started talking about the history
of it, and we realized that we kind of had
to go a little further back than smartphones or cell
phones or telephones because but essentially a smartphone is is
it is a telephone that is mobile, and what what
a mobile telephone is is technically a radio. Um, so
(02:57):
you go all the way back to what was six
Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah, that's alex as I like to
call him. Yeah, he came up with this idea. He
called it the electrical speech machine, and uh in eighteen
seventy six. And before him, there had been a lot
of work in physics for discovering things like the nature
of electromagnetism and how that could create certain waves, and
(03:20):
there was a there had also been development of a
thing called the telegraph, which was I know, nuts, right,
but I can send messages across distance, yeah, exactly, and
you don't have to use a horse or smoke or
a horse that's smoking. It's awesome. So yeah, the the
at this point we're talking about actually transmitting voice over electricity,
(03:43):
which was a phenomenal idea. And uh, the nice thing
about this is that you're looking at these different disciplines
that kind of combined to say, you know, there's probably
the potential to make a wireless communications system. We've figured
out how to do it by wire. We've got this
other work that physicists are doing in electromagnetism and radio waves.
(04:04):
I bet that we can figure out this this relationship
between electricity voice electromagnetism, make it work in some crazy
way to transmit voice across great distances without wires. And
there are a few people who are thinking of crazy
thoughts like that. Uh Marconi, he was one of them.
Kind of big, yeah, kind of big. There was the
(04:25):
internet Darling Tesla. Yeah yeah, when you say his name,
doves fly out of the internet. Uh yeah. While he
did make some amazing discoveries and was a phenomenal physicist
in his day, also was a crazy, crazy man. He
is his his picture is looking at us from the
podcast wall right now, staring staring deeply into me and
(04:48):
judging me. That might also be my I get a
little grouchy with Tesla. Edison also very important during this
time up by the way, that's your queue taboo. You
cheer Tesla and you boo Edison. That how the internet works. Well,
he killed elephants. He did kill elephants. That's true. He
used alternating current to shock elephants to death. But we're
(05:09):
kind of getting off base anyway. At this point, we're
talking about radio. So now radio, of course plays an
important part because when you get to the point of
cellular telephones, you're really talking about another version of radio communication.
So you've got the the development of the telephone and
the development of radio all going on at the same time. Uh.
And then we'll skip ahead a little bit because although
(05:29):
there are lots and lots of things we can talk
about during this time, ultimately they don't really uh inform
our discussion about the history of the smartphone. I would
go all the way to oh, I'm I'm actually not
familiar with this, with this particular reference that ves wireless
even wireless. Okay, so there's actually a clip online where
(05:50):
you can watch this silent film. And I did not
know about this until this morning. So I don't think
that I'm brilliant because I put this in our notes.
I just found out about it a thought it was
too cool to pass up because I was looking around
and someone jokingly referred to it as the first smartphone.
It's a silent film that shows two women walking down
the street having a conversation, or at least that's what
(06:12):
we assume they're doing, because we can't hear them. They
could be making bird noises for all I know. They
come up to a fire hydrant, and as two women
in the early twentieth century would do, they stop at
the fire hydrant. Clearly, of course, they wrap a wire
around the end of the fire hydrant and they and
(06:32):
the other end of that wires holds up to a radio.
And then there's another wire from the radio going to
an umbrella, which one of the two ladies opens up
and holds up into the air. And then they fiddle
with some knobs on the radio that is now wired
to both the umbrella and the fire hydranydrant. And then
it cuts with the magic of cinema to a radio
(06:55):
operator who is holding up a transmitter to a phonograph
and plays music from the phonograph through the radio transmitter,
which the two ladies on the street are apparently listening
to the umbrella. And yes, yes, so this was this
was what people were calling the first smartphone because it
was using wireless radio technology to transmit communications exactly. I
(07:20):
like to think of it as the first iPod commercial.
But yeah, that's why I put that in there, because
someone jokingly referred to it as the first smartphone, which
really it only had one way communication. You can only receive.
There was not a transmitter, right, they didn't have a
microphone waked up to it exactly. Certainly that was going
to be in the sequel. Yes, yes, it was Eve's
Witness to the Reckoning. Um did not yet did not
(07:44):
do well the box office, sadly. That's why I had
to put that in there, just because the clip is online,
and I'll share a clip of that in our Facebook
page so you guys can get a look at it
because it's it's entertaining, It sounds spectacular. If this were
not audio, then I would want to play it right now.
Uh no, But but we we had some actual mobile
call technology going on by the correct that's correct. You
(08:08):
got a T and T and bell Labs now Bell Labs,
is the research and development arm of a T and
T correct and Bell Labs very much known for developments
in wireless communication as well just communication technology in general.
So in the nineteen forties they developed the first wireless network,
and that's kind of being generous, Uh what was it?
(08:32):
What was it like? Back in so imagine that you
are in a big metropolis and your big metropolis has
a wireless network that consists of a single tower with
a transmitter on it, and that transmitter is capable of
handling oh maybe a dozen channels of communication, so that's
(08:53):
all it could handle at one time. So in other words,
even if you had a lot of people with the handsets,
you could have of them actually operated simultaneous or maybe
even just six because I don't know if it was
too like it was two ways, but I honestly don't
know because I didn't have enough information there. But but
the the first wireless call was made by a truck driver,
(09:14):
showing that even back in the nineteen forties we were
not practicing safe driving techniques. And it was a hand
set like like a rotary phone. Hands do you know
what a rotary phone is? Lauren? I remember rotary phones
from when I was about three. Lauren's a little younger
than I am, so, so the rotary phone handle, it's
this giant handle, right, and it's got like a cord
(09:35):
that goes down to the base unit of this wireless telephone.
And how how large was the based unit of a
wireless telephone? Well, I don't have the specific dimensions, but
I can tell you it weighed eighty pounds and for
our friends who used the metric systems, thirty six point
three kilograms. So not exactly fit in your pocket mobile,
(09:56):
not so much something that you want to want to
take around with you, you know, I mean vacations. I
assume it's camera was really crappy, Yeah, terrible. Yeah, yeah,
a zero megapixel camera, right. Yeah. The only app could
I could run is call this person, and that's only
if you dialed it. Um. Yeah, eighty pounds. Yeah. If
Steve Jobs had come out in two thousand and seven
(10:17):
and unveiled the iPhone and it weighed eighty pounds, I
doubt it would have done quite so well on the market. Yeah,
not so much, but for those purposes. Yeah, and it
cost fifteen dollars a month to have the service which
if you were to do an inflation calculator as I did,
which had the latest year as eleven, that's the most
recent figure, but in the fifteen dollars a month would
(10:39):
be a hundred thirty eight dollars a month, which which actually, yeah,
that I would take that today. Yeah, that's actually lower
than what I'm paying. Although although I suppose that, yeah,
that that that eighty pounds of lugging equipment around is
maybe well, I would also be in better shape. I
wouldn't need to download any physical fitness apps to my phone,
because just carrying the phone would be physical fitness. Maybe
(11:01):
maybe we need to bring back the eighty pound phones.
Maybe maybe this is this will solve the oats any traffic.
If any of our listeners out there launch a company
where you market an eighty pound smartphone, we demand at
least some sort of residuals because we ain't getting rich
from podcasts and folks. Also a prototype send one over.
Yeah okay, So moving on, we get to nine. Now
(11:27):
this is where we start seeing companies look into developing
cellular networks. So going beyond that single transmitter model I
was just talking about. Now we're looking at building the
foundation that would allow people to make sell calls. Right,
and by cellular, of course, we mean a telephone that
can go through a network of towers and keep the
(11:49):
signal exactly, yes, because that's a that would be an issue.
If you were to move outside the broadcast range of
a transmitter and a receiver, then you would drop your call.
So if you have a network of these transmitters and receivers,
then the theoretically you can move from one to the
other and you'd be fine, but you'd have to figure
out how to coordinate. Yeah, you gotta you gotta build
(12:10):
the architecture so that the phone when it moves from
one to the other, gets handed off from one tower
to another tower, or a communication ceases. This is not
a trivial problem, and it will take many decades of
work and and lots of infrastructure goes into it. And
uh yeah, and so so even though we technically had
the capacity to make these calls, to make these mobile
(12:32):
calls back in the nineties, we would not have the
infrastructure to do so. I mean, I mean, I guess
it started in right, Yeah, No, you're exactly right. Even today,
I mean, certain parts of Atlanta we drive through and
I'm just like you can you gehit that dead section?
There's a section on okay, And I apologize to all
the people who are going to hear the pronunciation of
this street, but this is how we say it in Atlanta.
Ponstall le in when you go downstall. I'm sorry, it's
(12:55):
not pomps Own, which is what how my wife pronounces it,
being from Philadelphia, she refuses to sleep in Florida. Yeah,
they can't. I'm a little bit physically incapable of saying it.
After after about eight years, I worked it out. It's
it's tough, but yeah, there are certain dead sections. Clearly,
we still have to keep building those networks out if
we want to have universal coverage across the United States. Um,
(13:16):
that sounds weird. Universal coverage across the United States Universal
if it's universal, doesn't make it international anyway. Moving on, so, so, yeah,
we're talking decades of work to build out the cellular networks,
which at the at that time, you know, no one
was using because there was there wasn't nothing networks, right,
it was physically impossible to crazy, Yeah, and it wasn't.
(13:38):
It wasn't in fact until the nineteen seventies that they
managed to pull off that first cellular call. It was yeah,
Martin Cooper. Okay, so this is a great, great story.
Martin Cooper and executive with Motorola. Are you imagine this?
You head up a research and development facility within Motorola. Sure, okay.
You know that you have uh uh peers in the
(14:01):
industry who are working on cellular networks at the same
time that your group is working on them. Yes, the
big one being Bell Labs of a T and T.
You and your team managed to make a cellular network
and a phone that will work on that network, and
you can make a call to anyone. Who is the
first person you call? My mom? I'm not sure. Well,
(14:26):
Martin Cooper decided to call the head of the research
and development team over at Bell Laboratories because the very
first cell phone call was a crank call. That is amazing.
Isn't that phenomenal? How many more cell phone calls would
follow in that wake? Did he ask if his refrigerator
wasning Prince Albert in a can? Actually I don't think
(14:47):
he did any of that, but but yes, the famously,
he very cheekily made a phone call to the two
executive over at Bell Labs which was kind of tweaking
their nose at the same time as having this historic
moment on that phone was also a little a little clunky.
It was not eighty pounds, but it was about one
point seven five pounds, which is around point eight krams.
(15:08):
And it had a cute nickname Brick, which you know, obviously,
if if I saw a phone marketed as the Brick,
I'm just thinking, boy, I gotta get my hands on
that thing. Oh yeah, oh yeah, the eyebricks. Canna get
the lead weight too, that would be awesome. So but
this this obviously showed a shift in telephone technology. It
(15:30):
would still be quite a few years before cell phones
became a common thing in the consumer market, but we
started to see them get adopted for advanced users, for
business users probably yep. We also those first adopters, those
early adopters who would like to be on the bleeding
edge of technology before it's even proven. They would go
(15:51):
out and get one. They were really expensive, they were
not very um practical, but this was the beginning of
that that trend. Um. Now, the next thing I have
here is nineteen seventy four, and uh, ladies and gentlemen
of Greek ancestry. I would like to apologize profusely for
what I am about to attempt, because nineteen seventy four
(16:12):
was when Theodore George and here we go, Paris Cavacos,
that's my best guest. Paris Scovaco said, it's a Greek name,
so obviously I probably have butchered it. But he patented
a concept. Uh he actually he submitted the patent in
nineteen seventy two, but in seventy four he was granted
the patent for a concept for what would be a
(16:34):
or an early smartphone, and I wasn't called that at
the time. Of course, it was called an apparatus for
generating and transmitting digital information. Smartphone is catchier. I see,
I see why that one stuck. Although I would say, Lauren,
you you're familiar somewhat with the the realm of the
steampunk a little bit, I would think that steampunk fans
(16:55):
what they really need to do is just go through
and look at patent titles, because every patent title is
really more of a description of what the device does.
And if you've ever seen anyone who creates steampunk gadgets,
that's almost always what they name their stuff. It's not
a simple name. It's a descriptor. It's as many words
as you can possibly fit into a single phrase without
(17:17):
losing your breath and falling over. And the word ether
has to be in there somewhere. Well clearly, yeah, I
mean obviously it's the most important part. Also, don't forget
your goggles. Uh, that's neither here nor there. Moving on,
so so so in in seventy four, um um, our friend,
our friend Teddy. Yeah I like that. Yes, Teddy put
in this patent um and then proceeded to do absolutely
(17:38):
nothing with it. Is that correct? Well? Yeah, I mean
it kind of just sort of languished because while the
concept was there, the technology wasn't really up to task
to fulfilling on that promise. Because the idea was to
have this handheld device that could transmit digital information at
the time in the in the handheld device would not
(18:01):
really be able to do that efficiently. We're talking about
I mean, we were in nineteen seventy four. I'm again,
you would be more familiar with this because you were ancient. Um,
but I was not born in seventy four. Thank you,
I don't have to wait a year. But yes, yes,
hand handheld devices at the time could could do not
very calculating. We had some, We had some We had
(18:24):
some really good graphics calculators first starting around the around
the seventies. Yeah, Hewett Packard had some some calculators and
IBM of you as well. But they were more than
the size of our laptops. They were closer to that
than a than a slider phone, definitely. And in nineteen
seventy four, you're also talking about this is this is
right at the very bleeding edge of the personal computer.
(18:46):
Are so a smartphone, which in a way is like
a a a distant cousin of the PC that fits
in your hand. Clearly, it would be unreasonable to think
of something like that existing in seventy four when the
actual PC still itself was not much, not really a thing.
Yet you have to wait another couple of years for
those to become a thing. So when when did when did? Um?
(19:08):
I mean because one of the ancestors of smartphones had
to have been p D a Personal Digital assistance which
which came onto the scene in the early eighties, Is
that correct? So there's this company called Scion, and that's
going to become important in a little bit too. Ssion
created this device called the organizer. Now, the first organizer
was more of a curiosity. It was part calculator, part
(19:31):
database manager, or part part like digital note taker. So
imagine that you have a watch that also lets you
type stuff in it, but you can't do anything else
with the stuff, so you can make it just sits
in the watch forever. Right, Yeah, you could delete it eventually.
I think they had to use Actually I don't think
(19:51):
it's this one, but there is one p d A
I read about where the only way to reformat it
was to bathe it an ultra violet radiation, which, of course,
I mean I have one of those devices at home.
So yeah, the dogs love it. I'm kidding, I'm kidding,
they hate it. So yeah, the the organizer, all it
was was a clock in this a way of taking notes.
(20:14):
But you couldn't you couldn't organize it in any other way. Really,
it was like you could put I could put down
your name and your phone number, and then under on
the next line under I might put eggs, milk, bread,
you know, et cetera. And then on the next line
down I might say, um, you know, write down what
a person's address, And there's there's no rhyme or reason.
There wasn't there was no particular operating system, right. But
(20:37):
one just two years later they introduced the organizer too,
and that one was really the very first pd eight
had a lot more features that actually had allowed you
to organize stuff into different categories, and it laid the
groundwork for what the p d A would be over
the next really the next decade and a half. P
d a's, I mean they technically still exist, but mostly
(20:59):
they've been co opted by smartphones. It's one of those
many things that we have replaced in our pockets with
a single We went from so we went from seventy
four to eight four. What's our next jump? I think
our next jump is all the way to ninety four. Yeah,
we'd like to take these decades people. Um, And that
was that was when that was the first time that
(21:20):
that a p d A and a cell phone really
got got kind of smooshed together. Right, Yeah, So what
IBM dead? It was IBM IBM took a PDA and
they took a cell phone, and they put them in
a room together and put on some very white music.
And about nine months later, the Simon Personal Communicator came
out and that's how smartphones are born. Actually that's mostly
(21:41):
a lie, but no, they did. They did come up
with a product called the Simon Personal Communicator, and yeah,
it was part cell phone, part p d A. So
in a way it's the kind of like the great
grandfather of smartphones. And it could send facsimiles. Is that correct, Verry?
What wasn't that one of the first messages that it sent.
I believe during one of their their stage shows they
(22:01):
sent a facts from one end of the stage to
the other and we're like, check us out you yeah,
which is at that time that was pretty exciting certainly,
and you know, it's it's hard for us to remember now,
but for all, remember all those you know, all those
hoax emails or jokes you would get an email and
then later on you would start getting them on things
like Facebook. My very dear grandmother still still uses email
(22:22):
to send them. Yeah, so you get those forwards. Back
in the day, which was a Thursday, remember, uh, we
used to send those via facts. They're called facts lure.
Facts Laura is a type of folklore where the same
sort of hoaxes and jokes would get passed around on
facts as they do today. On email or through social networks,
(22:43):
and so very important to allow people to pass on
that message that Bill Gates will give them lots of
money if they forward this message on which it's not
true critical but but yeah, and it was, it was,
I mean relatively tremendously expensive at the time, the sign
and um, it was it cost it cost a thousand
(23:03):
ninety nine dollars um by itself or a contract because
even then even then didn't when they're working with Bill
cell I think, um they had teamed up with Bell
Seal to do this. Who wasn't entirely sure about this
whole cell phone thing quite at that moment, the smartphone, right, Yeah,
I mean it was. It was a big risk at
(23:23):
that time. And even at that price, they still sold,
they still sold quite a few, uh products. Now granted
again these were going to very you know, a very
specialized market because not everyone could afford a well in
to day's dollars would be nearly more than sixteen hundred
dollars for a phone. Sixteen hundred dollars for a phone
for a phone. Yeah, but if you which is twice
(23:45):
what I would pay for anyone contract, And of course
I guess we should take this moment to also acknowledge
the fact to all of our listeners overseas who are
used to buying your phones without any subsidies from your
cell phone carrier. We totally understand the you you pay
more perfone than we do. But we're coming at it
from the perspective of people in the United States who
(24:06):
sign away two years of our lives in order to
be able to buy a phone for about four dollars
cheaper than what it would go for otherwise. We we
have to make a blood OAF but it only costs
about two hundred dollars to the phone, and somehow it
works out. Yeah, there's there's usually some sort of weird
ceremony involved, but two guys over there don't need to
know all about that. We don't want to give away
all our secrets. But so, but so, the Simon, the
Simon Personal Communicator, really I kind of didn't do well.
(24:29):
I don't think it was it was a few thousand,
but you know, it was like it was tet and
it was kind of a prototype. And and again the
infrastructure was not prepared to handle something like that. There
weren't that many places that you could use it. Yeah,
and and for for something that was based on a
concept of you can use this anywhere that wasn't really
it was it was, and so I think it was
(24:49):
off the market. It was. It was definitely one of
more of a proof of concept. That's why it turned out.
It turned out to be more of a proof of
concept that it turned out to be a useful product
on and so one because of those very things you say,
because yeah, I mean if if your whole thing is
this is mobile, then you better be able to use
it MOBI. Yeah. Apart from like it's mobile, as long
(25:13):
as you stay within this four square foot area of
this part of the office that's adjacent to this giant window,
that's not terribly useful. No no, um. But But but
very soon after that, in nineties six, Palms started Yeah Palm,
man boy, what a And we've done an episode about Palm,
a couple of episodes about Palm and including it's a
(25:34):
relationship with other companies. But in ninety six that's when
it started to really make a name for itself in
the personal Digital assistant UH market. And they released the
Pilot one thousand and Pilot five thousand, and people who
owned Palm p D as are some of the most
passionate technology lovers I know, oh absolutely. I mean there
I know people who still will talk about either their
(25:56):
PDA or their Palm. Smartphones, like the Trio owners are like, well,
they're like a mega owners. And I don't mean that
in a bad way. I just mean that they are
really passionate about that product. Right, Yes, absolutely, and it's
it's easy to see why. I mean it was. It
was very exciting at the time that the level of
functionality that they were getting out of out of a
(26:17):
thing that you could put in your pocket and carry
around with you and have have access to um all
sorts of stuff. Man, I mean you could have all
your calendar in there, you could have files, you could
even run apps on these things. It was. It was
a small, portable, very limited computer. Yes, go just another
(26:37):
year and then you know, there's this company that pops
up in n called HTC. Now I'm going to tell
you a story here, Lauren. You guys out there you
can listen in if you like HTC. I had never
heard of HTC because I was not into smartphones at
all until I got until first, and so I didn't
(27:00):
that's actually right. It came out in two thousand eight,
but I didn't buy my until two thousand nine. So
that's really remarkable that you knew that that Lauren's been stalking. Anyway,
I've been listening to your other podcasts. You've talked about
this before, Jonathan. Fair enough, fair enough, So HTC. I
had never heard of them. I didn't realize that they had.
They were first founded, and in fact, they've had a
(27:21):
much longer association with smartphones than I was aware. When
I saw the g One, I naively thought, oh, this
must be like one of their first products, because I've
never heard of them before. Now that was due to
my ignorance, not due to HTC's UH success in the
the or lack thereof in in UH in the market.
In fact, we'll talk a little bit about some of
their other products in a in a bit. So, yeah,
(27:44):
HTC pops up on the scene and they become a
big name, although not they don't always have a smooth
sailing kind of relationship with the market either. HTC has
been having some issues over the last couple of years.
In fact, most most technology companies, I think are doing
a tiny bit of that here and there. You found
out the first use of the term smartphone. Yes. Um,
(28:06):
that also happened in it was attached to one of
Ericsson's phones, UM called the g S eight eight a
k a. The Penelope. Oh it's not Penelope, not Penalope. Man,
I've been saying it wrong all these years. Um, but yeah,
this this was this was basically a concept model. I
think only about two were ever produced. But um, but yes,
(28:27):
that was the first marketing package that had the word
smart and phone in conjunction. There was a space between them,
so clearly there was a lot of work to be
done in the marketing field. Deleting that space would take
two years, two years of hard work. You thought building
that cellular network was tough. Space is big yo, getting
(28:48):
rid of it. But yeah, yeah, and and and this
is this is where that the rest of our outline
is extremely crunched together. It's it's if I drew a
little picture and had to start making bendylines going all
over the place. Well, yeah, because up to now we've
been jumping like we were doing. We were doing fifty
year jumps for a while, then we got down to
ten year jumps. Now we're doing like two and pretty
(29:09):
soon we've got a whole bunch of stuff happening year
by year, year by year, a month by month. So, Lauren,
it turns out we had a lot to say about
the history of smartphones. We talk a lot. Yeah, So
it turned out to be so long that we're doing
something that it's not unusual for text stuff. We're splitting
it into two episodes, so we're gonna leave off here,
but we'll pick up in our next episode right where
(29:30):
we left off. If you guys have topics you would
like us to tackle on tech stuff, email us our
addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com or contact us
on Facebook or Twitter. Are handle us tech stuff, hs
W and Lauren and I will talk to you again
really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is its staff works dot com.
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