Short answers, pulled from the story.
Martin Cooper of Motorola demonstrated the first handheld mobile phone in New York City on the 3rd of April 1973. The handset weighed about 2 kilograms, roughly 4.4 pounds. Cooper made the first call to Joel S. Engel, a rival at AT&T.
The DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone, released in 1983. Motorola was the market leader in mobile phones from 1983 to 1998.
A cellular network divides a service area into many small cells, each with a base station reaching on the order of a kilometer. Frequency reuse lets distant cells share the same channel without interference, allowing thousands of subscribers to talk at the same time within one geographic area.
From 1993 to 2024, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over 9.1 billion, enough to provide one for every person on Earth. In nearly half the world's countries, over 90 percent of the population, about 7.2 billion people, owns at least one.
A SIM card, or Subscriber Identity Module, is a small microchip that securely stores the service-subscriber key IMSI and the Ki used to identify and authenticate a user. The first SIM card was made in 1991 by the Munich smart card maker Giesecke & Devrient for the Finnish operator Radiolinja.
Android and iOS are the two most-used smartphone platforms. Android has been the best-selling system worldwide since 2011, and as of March 2025 it held 71.9 percent of the market while iOS held 27.7 percent.
Demand for metals used in mobile phones and other electronics fuelled the Second Congo War, which claimed almost 5.5 million lives. The company Fairphone has worked to develop a mobile phone that does not contain conflict minerals.