The first "mobile" phones were hardly mobile at all. They were handsets attached to a large and heavy battery, such as this Motorola 4500x. Costing well over £1,000 and with little more than 20 minutes of talktime before the battery ran out, it is easy to see why even the experts thought they would never be anything more than a niche product for the very rich.
In June 2007 the mobile phone industry was given a harsh wake-up call as Apple launched the iPhone. The first version may have been designed to work on the rather slow GPRS networks of the day, but the following year Apple announced a 3G version of the device and allowed third party developers to start producing their own downloadable applications. By the start of 2010 more than 3bn apps had been downloaded by iPhone users across the world.
