The Device in Your Pocket

It’s been Computer Science Enrichment Week this week, and in today’s final assembly of the term, our reading was all about something we all take for granted, that we rely on more than we probably care to admit, and that we are only just beginning to consider whether its benefits come at too high a cost.

I imagine almost everyone reading this blog probably has a mobile phone. This device, which we take completely for granted, has a surprisingly short history, yet its evolution and impact have been revolutionary.

The story of the mobile phone only really began in the final part of the 20th Century. The first true mobile phone call was made on 3 April 1973 in New York City by Motorola engineer Marty Cooper, although the device he used was nothing like those we have today. The world’s first commercially available mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, didn’t go on sale until 1984. This device, affectionately known as a ‘brick’, was a bulky 790g – about four times heavier than a modern iPhone – and incredibly expensive, costing the equivalent of about £9,500 today.  For that huge price, all you could do was make calls, and even then, not for very long. It had a battery life of around 30 minutes, and it took 10 hours to charge.

The arrival of the 2G signal in the 1990s meant that phones became much smaller, and for the first time, people could send and receive texts. Games like Snake became popular around 1997, and cameras arrived on mobiles in 1999. The smartphone era began in January 2007 when Steve Jobs unveiled the first Apple iPhone, combining a music player, internet capabilities, and a touchscreen mobile phone, which marked a leap into modern computational photography and constant mobile broadband access.

Of course, the smartphone of today is more of a highly sophisticated computer than a phone. It has more computing capability than the systems that guided NASA’s Apollo missions. Modern mobile processors, often called a System on a Chip, manage core computing, camera processing, gaming graphics, and artificial intelligence, all within a tiny, energy-efficient package. To achieve this, a single mobile device contains dozens of complex components, including the Central Processing Unit (CPU), various types of memory (RAM and ROM), antennae, several Integrated Circuits (ICs), a microphone, and the SIM card.

Many phones are designed and engineered in America, but their parts are sourced from around the world. China, notably Mongolia, supplies ninety percent of the rare earth minerals needed for the screen, circuitry, and speakers. Display panels, memory, and microchips are sourced heavily from Asia, including Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and other specialist parts, such as the gyroscope, are supplied by European countries. In many cases, these global components are brought together for final assembly in China. The mobile phone is a true example of our globalised world.

Mobile phones have undoubtedly transformed our lives. I remember buying my first phone in 1995. It was huge, and quite intimidating, not only because of its size but because of how expensive it was to use and how little time its battery lasted. Whether they’ve been a force for good is, for the first time ever, now a live debate. They help keep us safe, they help us connect with people we may otherwise never know or friends and family living anywhere in the world, and they give instant access to information that can be very useful. But they also keep us distant, often from those closest to us, both physically and metaphorically; they distract us with constant notifications; and they have affected both sleep patterns and attention spans.

I wondered in today’s assembly what the Head of this school will be saying in 100 years’ time to the pupils at Brentwood about communications technology and how we communicate more generally – whether the questions now emerging about heavy use of our phones will prove just a blip in an unstoppable direction of travel, or a turning point where we all start to reexamine our relationship with this remarkable invention that has changed our lives in such a short period of time.

Have a great Easter – hopefully with at least some time away from phones!

Best wishes

Michael Bond