The future is bright and it is mobile

It all began with the vision of one man in the early 1970s, Martin Cooper, general manager of the communications systems department at Motorola. He created the first mobile phone citing "Captain Kirk's communicator on Star Trek as an inspiration."

In a recent CBS television interview, Mr Cooper said with reference to the first ever mobile call: "This is a time when there were no cordless phones, and certainly no cell phones. And here's this guy (Mr Cooper himself) talking as he was walking along. And I stepped into the street and nearly got creamed by a New York taxicab."

In the beginning, the technology itself was nearly overrun by legislation. In addition, few corporations - including Motorola itself - believed in Mr Cooper's mobile phone solution, mostly because of the amount of investment required to build the initial infrastructure to make mobile telephony a successful business venture.

While lost in this bureaucratic and political wilderness of US legislation and regulations, the technology gained more ground in Japan and Europe. In fact, some European countries agreed on a standard to be used throughout all of the different countries. This is how the Groupe Speciale Mobile (GSM) was born in 1982, with the first GSM calls made a decade later in 1991. Thanks to this standardisation, manufacturers of mobile technology could start reaping benefits from a larger and eventually inter-continental market, giving them the opportunity to focus their resources on additional services, not voice calls only.

One of the initial additional services was text messaging (SMS). Nowadays there is an ever growing spectrum of services ranging from the mentioned text but also picture messaging, internet on mobiles and mobile devices having internet speeds of up to 21 Mbps, which can be used as routers to connect nearby computers to the internet.

The latest innovation is the ability of packing into a pocket device most of the services - if not more - than a person would have demanded from a desktop computer around three to five years ago. Not to mention the benefit of seeing mobile phones shrinking in size and weight from a 1,133 grammes (the Motorola Dyna-Tac Martin Cooper did the first call from) to 133 grammes (the iPhone 3G) - that's a kilogramme less to carry!

It is easy to take for granted the very obvious benefits of using mobile phones, such as, for instance, sending a text message to your loved ones on touchdown after a long flight, and the ease of mind it brings. Gone are the days of waiting next to a telephone set in the hallway at 11 p.m. for that international call - we now have the luxury to chat with people continents away while at the beach watching the sun set.

We take for granted the ease by which we find our friends in a crowded concert, or the easiness of sharing a worthy moment by having a video call. No need to go up on the roof and shout out to all your friends after that great win at that special game - all you need is a phone with access to Facebook which will give you the opportunity to do so virtually and in real-time, to whoever you choose. These devices are now an extension of ourselves.

On a larger scale, mobile phones have had an effect on society, none seen more clearly than the impact on how news is being reported. Sometimes news passed on to us on our television screens has been shot with mobile phones from ordinary people who were possibly in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The images of the harrowing Asian Tsunami of 2004 were shot by those present via their mobile phones and camcorders (soon to be included in the upcoming smartphones). Sometimes the mobile phone was the only means of communication with the outside world, for lack of other devices or through political constraints, as was in the case of the unrest in Tibet in 2008 and during the present turmoil in Thailand.

In this way the mobile phone is democratising the news we're watching, giving more power to the individual and is becoming our window to unique events, making each individual a potential beacon for freedom of speech. These political aspects of mobile phone use cannot be ignored, as in the case of the already mentioned recent uprisings in Thailand. From the authorities sending their ultimatum via text message to the "Red Shirts" filming their actions via their camera phones, phones are dictating the future of countries and helping us have a clear view on what's happening.

Mobile phones have become economic drivers too. A study conducted five years ago already showed a direct co-relation between growth in mobile use and subsequent GDP increases in Africa. A case in point is Kenya, where people are using voice minutes as currency, and where they're finding that it's more practical to conduct everyday transactions with voice minutes then literal coins and paper money. Some of these users were seeing this even as mitigation to inflation. In fact, one of the mobile operators in that country runs a service whereby one can transfer voice minutes and credit from one mobile phone subscription to another.

This is the first part of an article in the series tracing the development of technology over the past decade.

Mr Cassar is terminals senior executive at Vodafone Malta.