15 years ago: the first mass-produced GSM phone
Happy Birthday, Nokia 1011 (almost)
Forgotten Tech Fifteen years ago tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, Nokia launched the world's first commercially available GSM digital phone, the Nokia 1011, the model number coming from the launch date: 10 November 1992.
Nokia's 1011: GSM first
The 475g 1011 was rather heavier than today's slimline models. A lot of the weight came from the unit's nickel-cadmium rechargeable battery, which yielded a low - by today's standards - talk time of just 90 minutes. It could stay operational for 12 hours in stand-by mode.
The 195 x 60 x 45mm handset could hold 99 phone numbers and the names of their owners, any of which could be displayed on the 1011's two-line screen. There was no colour, no camera, no Bluetooth, no memory card slot and the handset had to have an extendible antenna. But it did introduce one innovation that phone owners now use without a second thought: text messaging.
However, the 1011 lacked that crucial component of all modern Nokia's: the infamous Nokia ringtone. This jingle wasn't introduced until 1994.
The 1011 wasn't the first GSM phone, either. That honour goes to the unnamed handset Nokia developed for Finland's Radiolinja network in 1991. The Finnish phone giant also supplied testing handsets that year for Hutchison's Orange in the UK, then in the process of building its network up from the Rabbit service launched a few years previously.
Advertisment from Germany, circa 1993
GSM
Development work on GSM - originally Groupe Spécial Mobile, later anglicised to Global System for Mobile communications - began ten years before the introduction of the Nokia 1011, in 1982. Five years, later 13 European nations agreed to mandate its use for their digital cellular networks.
The first version of the standard - dubbed 'Phase 1' - was completed in 1990, paving the way for the completion of the Radiolinja network, which had been initiated a year earlier, in 1989, and became operational in 1991.
However, unlike its predecessors, the 1011 was the first GSM phone to go into mass production. It operated in the 900MHz band, which had been adopted by UK networks Vodafone and Cellnet - now O2. Orange's phones operated in the 1800MHz band.
For all three, GPRS data services were way off in the future. Orange didn't launch its digital service commercially until 1994, the same year that Cellnet launched a digital network alongside its analogue service.
Nokia replaced the 1011 in 1994 with the 2100.
More Forgotten Tech...
• Compact Disc: 25 years old today
• From 1981: the World's first UMPC
• The IBM ThinkPad: 15 years old today
• Apple's first handheld: the Newton MessagePad
• Atari's Portfolio: the world's first palmtop
• 'Timna' - Intel's first system-on-a-chip
• BeOS: the Mac OS X might-have-been
• Sony's first Mylo
COMMENTS
@Tom Oliva
It matters not about IMEI blocking. The little s#!tbags who steal mobile phones *do not care* that the phones they have stolen are useless to them. It's enough for them to know that you have been deprived of your property.
While we're reminiscing, my first *digital* mobile was a Nokia 5110, certainly not a bad handset; though I had owned an analogue mobile (branded "People's Phone", who were taken over by Vodafone) since 1995.
My first phone.
It seems like a life time ago. But my first phone was a Nokia Talkman 620. Huge,heavy and crap battery life! But it worked and I almost always had a signal. It was a car phone with a battery stuck to it but I could run my business and keep in touch with others while I was out. But as I was one of the first in my town to own a portable (mobile would be stretching it!) phone, mates would call me from work just to see where I was and it was embassasing to answer a phone in town with people looking at you as if you were weird. I would have got less attention if I walked round naked!
@ Mahoney
I think that sounds like the Nokia 1610. I sold phones at the time and someone had tried to nick one of these off one of our customers. He simply battered the bloke with it.
I don't think the iPhone has quite the same potential as a weapon!
Take a good look, gentlemen...
...that was when a phone was a phone.
The Old Sony's
I started out on an NEC P3 and then went to one of those tiny (at the time) Sony's with the flip down boom mic. I loved the Sony, a fantastic piece of kit that only failed once. I was riding up to Hollyhead from Cambridge to get the late night ferry to Dublin and put it in my tank bag, my magnetic tank bag.
They warranty replaced it. I then got a non-descript Mitsubishi and a Nokia until I got the mother of all cool phones, the Nokia 8810, what a chrome beauty.
I didn't want to change that phone. Now I have a BlackBerry and life is just much more interrupted.
