1. The First Commercial Mobile Phone

The world's first mobile phone call was made in 1973 by Motorola employee Martin Cooper

from the streets of New York City. He called his biggest rival. "I was calling Joel Engel who was

my antagonist, my counterpart at AT&T, which at the time was the biggest company in the

world. We were a little company in Chicago. They considered us to be a flea on an elephant,"

Cooper told BBC.

"I said 'Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cellphone, a real, handheld, portable cellphone.'

There was a silence at the other end. I suspect he was grinding his teeth."

The phone he called on was a prototype Motorola DynaTAC which, a decade later, was to

become the world's first commercially available mobile handset. It got the FCC's thumbs up in

1983 and launched in 1984 at a cost of $3,995 -- which is about $9,000 today, accounting for

inflation.

As a symbol for '80s yuppie tech, the DynaTAC appeared in Gordon Gekko's hands in Wall

Street, and later, Patrick Bateman used one in American Psycho. It was also known as the "Zack

Morris phone" because the Saved by the Bell character often used a similar model in the series.

The first mobile phone call in the UK took place in 1985. Comedian and one-half of Morecambe

and Wise, Ernie Wise, called from London to Vodafone's Newbury, Berkshire offices, then

located over a curry house.

2. The First Smartphone

The world's first smartphone debuted in 1993 at Florida's Wireless World Conference. Launched

by BellSouth Cellular and "weighing in at a little more than a pound," it was a phone-come-PDA

with an early LCD touchscreen display.

The press release from the launch describes the new handset: "Designed by IBM, Simon looks

and acts like a cellular phone but offers much more than voice communications. In fact, users

can employ Simon as a wireless machine, a

pager, an electronic mail device, a calendar, an appointment schedular, an address book, a

calculator and a pen-based sketchpad -- all at the suggested retail price of $899."

With only 2,000 Simons made, the handset is now a collector's item. The Microsoft-backed Bill

Buxton Collection of retro tech boasts a Simon, and you can find out more about the pioneering

device on the website.

3. The 160-Character Text Message Limit

There are various theories

about who invented the text message. Short, text-based messaging was developed in a range of

telecommunications systems toward the end of the 20th century, but the man credited with

creating the SMS -- the mobile phone's short message service -- is German Friedhelm

Hillebrand.

Working for the GSM group, Hillebrand came up with the concept of a 128-byte text message to

be sent via the existing mobile phone network. The message's shortness was an obvious

parameter due to the size limit, but the exact 160-character limitation was a curious creation of

Hillebrand's.

The story goes that in 1985 Hillebrand experimented with making notes on his typewriter to

come up with the ideal message length. "Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers,

punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always

clocked in under 160 characters," the L.A. Times reports.

He ultimately deemed the 160-character limit as "perfectly sufficient," and with two more

"convincing arguments" (postcards and Telex transmissions often had fewer than 150

characters), the GSM group created the standard in 1986. Afterwards, all mobile phone carriers

and mobile phones were ordered to support it.

Nowadays you can send messages longer than 160 characters, but Hillebrand's legacy lives on

via Twitter. The micro-blogging service's 140-character limit was determined by text messaging

-- 140 characters for the tweet and 20 for the Twitter username.

4. The Pocket Dialing Problem

Chances are you've received a "phantom" call on your mobile phone, especially if your name

begins with an "A." "Pocket (or 'butt') dialing," when a jostled phone calls a number from

someone's pocket or bag, is one of the minor annoyances of mobile life.

For the emergency services though, it's a more serious problem. In the early 2000s the <=""

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TARGET="_blank">National Emergency Number Association revealed that "phantom wireless

calls" made up about 70% of 911 calls in some U.S. areas. In the UK the figure reached as many

as 11,000 calls per day.

So why is a pocket dial so likely to reach 911 or 999? Although a phone's keypad may have been

"locked," these numbers will still dial in case of a real emergency. In fact, many older American

mobiles <="" p="">

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TARGET="_blank">auto-dialled 911 when a caller pressed and held number nine, or two

numbers at once.

Phone designers and manufacturers have now disabled such options, but pocket dialing still

happens. Last year two men were overheard during a car burglary after one of their phones called

911. In May of this year a drug dealer was arrested after he pocket-dialed the police during a

deal. And a Maine man with an arrest warrant was "triangulated" and caught when he repeatedly

called the police from his pocket.

5. The World's Most Expensive Mobile Phone

British jeweler Stuart Hughes lays claim to creating the world's most expensive mobile phone.

The iPhone 4 "Diamond Rose" edition boasts a price tag of £5 million, which currently translates

to $8,184,968.42.

For that astonishing sum, the purchaser gets 500 individual flawless diamonds totaling over 100

carats, a rose gold Apple logo with 53 diamonds, and a single cut 7.4-carat pink diamond on the

home button.

Hughes has also bundled in an 8 carat single cut flawless diamond which can replace the pink

one, just in case you needed a sweetener to seal the deal.

7. Telephonophobia, Nomophobia,

Frigensophobia & Ringxiety

Our relationship with our mobile phones hasn't always been an easy one. Aside from the

etiquette issues a portable phone involves, some sources suggest our mental health has suffered

too.

With varying degrees of plausibility, experts have identified telephonophobia, nomophobia,

frigensophobia and ringxiety (or fauxcellarm) as conditions that can affect the mobile phone

generation.

Telephonobia is the fear of making or recieving phone calls.

Nomophobia (no-mobile-phone phobia) is the fear of being out of contact either by your phone

being lost, out of juice or out of signal range.

"Ringxiety" or "fauxcellarm" is described as a "psycho-acoustic phenomenon" when you hear (or

feel) your mobile ringing when it's not.

Frigensophobia is the fear that using your mobile is damaging your brain.