Short answers, pulled from the story.
Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first publicized handheld mobile phone call on the 3rd of April 1973. He spoke to Joel S. Engel, a rival engineer at AT&T, while holding a prototype handset that weighed approximately two kilograms or 4.4 pounds.
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone launched the world's first commercial automated cellular network in Japan in 1979. This system used analog technology known as first generation or 1G before Nordic Mobile Telephone followed across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in 1981.
Motorola held market leadership in mobile phones from 1983 until 1998. Nokia took over the top position from 1998 through 2012 before Samsung surpassed them in Q1 2012 selling 93.5 million units against Nokia's 82.7 million units.
By March 2025, Android held 71.9 percent of the overall smartphone market share while iOS had 27.7 percent. Android became the best-selling system worldwide on smartphones since 2011 with sales representing about 50 percent of total mobile phone sales in 2024.
In the UK, the total number of mobile phones overtook the number of houses in 1999. From 1993 to 2024, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over 9.1 billion according to available data.