I Tested 42 Years of Phones!

This right here is 42 years of mobile phones, right from the very first one all the way to the bleeding edge right now with a lot of help from the mobile phone museum. And it's only when you get them all together like this that you realize exactly why phones turned out the way they did and just how absurd the improvement numbers become. And it all starts in the 1980s. When the only way to call someone on the move was a car phone, which is basically just a landline handset that gets bolted into your car, wired to a 10 kilo box of radio equipment exclusively for high-flying business people who just could not risk being disconnected. But then came a completely new kind of network. Cellular. The old way, what we now call 0G, was one giant tower per city. But cellular splits the map into a honeycomb of small cells, each with its own tower. Which means, as you move, your call gets handed from one to the next without cutting off. This is still how your phone works today. At first, all that got us was car phones that you could take out your car. If you possess the required arm strength. Jeez. But it was Motorola who saw the real opportunity. Because your nearest tower is now often only a few hundred meters away, a phone only needs a fraction of the power to communicate with it. Which means for the first time, you don't need a car battery. You. Can hold it. I mean just imagine this being your reference point for a mobile phone and then one random day in 1984 someone just strolls past you holding a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. I mean this was the equivalent of a flying car pulling up next to you at the traffic lights. Especially because with just a single 10-hour overnight charge it could get you a full 30 minutes of talk time. So it was priced like the future too. At today's equivalent of, I kid you not, $13,000. And this one in particular might be a bit more than that because that signature, Marty Cooper, who was leading the Motorola team at the time and is actually considered the father of the cell phone. But that's only the start of the insane domino effects that ensued. Because up until this point, a phone number belonged to a place, a house, an office, a desk. You weren't calling a person. You were calling a building and just hoping that they happened to be inside it. But all of a sudden, the phone number belonged to you. And Motorola realised that, to truly capitalise on this, the thing had to not just fit in a briefcase or a leather bag, like you'd have for the DynaTAC, but in your pocket. So. The entire industry went to war on size, shrinking the parts, cramming them onto both sides of the circuit boards, shaving off every gram they could until 1989 when Motorola unveiled the MicroTAC 9800X at literally half the weight of the DynaTAC, if that. Okay, we should probably check if they achieved their goal. That must have felt insane at the time. Now a big part of the reason that it gets this small is it flips. Whoa, that's actually... Way more satisfying than I was expecting. Probably shouldn't do that for a phone this old though. So this means that you can still have the microphone sitting right next to your mouth when you're on a phone call. It's just now when you're done, you can flip it shut while hanging up your call for the first time. Man, you would have felt so cool doing that. Should actually be able to boot this one up. Boot screens have improved since then but it does work and this thing is more portable while being more capable. I mean the thing's based on the same 8 megahertz basic digital watch grade chip as the DynaTAC was and I can't wait for you to see just how explosively these numbers are about to level up. But even then they've squeezed in a few more features like there's an entire menu system here. You click menu and then you navigate to the relevant setting by tapping a number code. It's like each setting is its own TV channel. Not to mention the pretty revolutionary ability to save phone numbers by name. You could choose your own battery pack. Motorola sold them in different sizes. So you could pick the battery life and weight balance that you wanted. But my favorite thing about this phone is the antenna. It's basically a lie. The actual antenna is inside, but Motorola's focus groups found that the public did not think a phone could work without one sticking out the top, so they wouldn't buy it. You still see traces of this thinking in phones today, like how the icon for the iPhone's phone app still depicts a landline, even though kids born nowadays literally have no idea what that is. However, as revolutionary as this thing was, it was only based on the first generation One G. End. 1G had a couple of big problems. The first, your phone call was basically a radio broadcast. So anyone with a cheap radio scanner could just tune in and listen. The second, before you knew it... It was the 1990s, the era where networks started subsidising handsets to get people on contracts. So mobile phone use exploded and networks started flat out running out of room. So the second generation 2G fixed both problems with a single idea. Stop sending your voice as a wave and start sending it as numbers, zeros and ones. This meant that you could massively compress the data packets to not overload the cell towers and also you can scramble those numbers so that they can't just be listened into. But the single biggest thing that 2G changed is neither of those, because companies realized that if your phone can send zeros and ones, it doesn't just have to be your voice. It meant that all of a sudden, networks could carry mobile data And texts. In December 1992, a software programmer typed two words on a computer and sent them to a phone. Merry Christmas. That was the first ever short message service, or SMS, message. And the guy he was sending it to couldn't even reply because phones just weren't designed that way yet. And that's partly because up until this point, every single phone had been made by a radio company. And radio companies only cared about one thing, making phones smaller. But that changed in 1994, when IBM, a computer company, stepped in. Because they instead saw the opportunity for the phone to be smarter. And the result is what many people would look back on now as the first ever smartphone, the IBM Simon. Derived from Simon Says, because whatever you tell it to do, it does. And this is years before the word smartphone had even been coined, so they called it a personal communicator. I can't wrap my head around how this came out just five years after this. Estimating power figures for these early phones is very approximate, but just to give you an idea, the Simon had about 4,000 times the amount of RAM at one megabyte to do what it does, which is to swap out this simple text-based navigation for a full graphical interface. This is a different ball game entirely. So there's a digital number pad up here. Ooh la la. Resistive touchscreen, of course, so. It requires a little bit of pressure. There's a bunch of quick commands below that, like redialing the last number, or quick-dialing your loved ones, which I'm severely lacking apparently. There's even a folder at the bottom for all your apps! Oh yeah, and there's a stylus too. Whoa, this is... Far more responsive than I was expecting it to be. It's actually exposing how terrible my handwriting is. Oh, look at that. Simon Says Subscribe. What about the Notes app? Keyboard is so strange. It's got six letters at any time. You click other to cycle to the next set of six. Actually, as you start typing, you barely need to because it's predicting what's coming next. Do you wanna know what shocked me though? This phone is also the debut of what many people would consider the first game ever on a mobile phone. Scramble. Man, everything is just way more usable and polished than I expected. This is insane. And it is mad to think that even with everything going for it, the IBM Simon failed. Why? It was too ahead of its time. It was trying to do so much stuff before mobile batteries were able to support it. So while other phones at the time were starting to push two hours of talk time, this could only do one. And it had all of this crazy functionality like email and fax, but no mobile data or SMS. Because while the Simon was very much a 2G idea, it had been developed as a 1G phone. So what happens when someone builds the same idea on the right network? Two years later Nokia did exactly that and in a lot of ways you could consider this the great grandfather of the foldable phone. Look at this, it's a phone with a dial pad, little LCD screen. As a matter of fact it looks almost identical to the Nokia 2110 which already existed at this point except this phone also has a computer inside of it. Bruh. I was talking to the owner of the mobile phone museum, Ben, who was still in the scene when this thing was being launched and uh... Honestly it was just a revelation. You know people just couldn't believe such technology could exist and it was like something from the future. I would say the excitement was warranted. A fully 2G phone with a complete QWERTY keyboard ported straight from a computer and this entirely separate desktop style interface when unfolded. So I mean, you're not just SMS compatible now, but you can rattle texts off like three times faster than that six letter keyboard on the Simon. And then you've got buttons all over the place. Check this out. So you can go to calendar. Look at this, I mean, that's the whole month in your screen at once. January, 2080. Well, I guess maybe that's what it felt like. You've got notes, you've got contacts, and the navigation is just so much more responsive than the Simon. There's a dedicated button for internet. But if we go into extras, there is a composer for your ringtone. No. So it's got all the notes. Oh, so you pick which note you wanna change by going left and right. And then you just move it up or down to actually change what the note is. Why did this disappear from phones? This is so sick. And the communicator could not just exchange documents with a PC or download updates wirelessly from it via its infrared port. It basically was a PC on the inside. An Intel chip running at 24 megahertz with a ton more memory, making the communicator about 2.5 times more powerful than the Simon. And so in a way, we're already at 10,000 times the original Dynatac. And then there's the apps. I mean, the Simon could technically run third-party apps, but only one was ever made for it. It was basically a very early way to control your PC from your phone, and it was priced at $3,000. So the second thing that Nokia absolutely nailed here was creating a software development kit and actively going after devs to build for this thing. That's the seed of the App Store right there in 1996. You wanna see something hilarious, though? You know this thing's cousin, the Nokia 2110, has the earpiece up here and the mic down here, as you'd kind of expect, but there is actually so much tech crammed into this communicator that the only remaining place to fit them is the back, which means that when you want to call someone, it's not this. It's this. So, I mean, humorous logistics aside, Nokia had the hardware. And because of the massive bet that they placed on 2G, they had the network advantage too. Suddenly, this company was in prime position to take over. How do you achieve that? Well, I mean, you have to target the high end with phones like the Communicator. But even more importantly, you have to build something for the mainstream. And the Nokia 6110 was where I would say they struck gold. Marketed as having everything you want in a cellular phone, plus a few extras you might not expect. So there's a calculator, there's a calendar, and it all quite suddenly becomes very reasonable. To be getting features of this level For approximately $250, or about $520 in today's money. And can we just talk about for a second how they managed to trim the phone down to... To just that, I can actually wrap my hands around it for the first time in history. And it's all tied together with arguably the most intuitive user interface on the planet at the time. You got a home screen, you click menu, and you just move up and down to navigate. It just made sense. And most important of all, this phone is where they introduced Snake. All right, so games, Snake. They didn't even put it first. Starts longer than I expected and use the dial pad to change direction. It's actually so mad playing this now. Thinking that this might actually have been the first video game I ever played. I actually distinctly remember the feeling of if I was bored, but there was someone around who had a Nokia phone, everything was gonna be fine because I could play this and I'm dead. 72 is not bad though. Now, this wasn't the very first phone that could play a game, as we've seen, but because of Snake, this is the phone that popularized the concept, what many would argue to be the birth of the mobile gaming industry. One second, I'm just so long right now. Oh yeah, it is also worth mentioning just how fast this company was innovating at this point, because within just two years of the 6110, we were in the 2000s and Nokia dropped an absolutely... Oh my god. Never mind. I dropped it. This was a nuclear phone. Yep, it's a 3310. And it's like yet another giant leap in compactness. The whole design just screams Y2K, especially the metallic number pad with a faintly glowing LED that you can see through them. And the external antenna is finally gone, which put together is actually a big part of why this phone developed its reputation for indestructibility, as I... So helpfully demonstrated. And this elevated the 3310 to legendary status. For contacts, the IBM Simon back in the day managed to hit 50,000 lifetime sales. This phone, 126 million. No one had seen anything like it before. But there was a new era dawning. By 2003, the 2G standard was updated to Edge, aka 2.75G. New breakthroughs in how data was encoded and transmitted basically tripled speeds, so it was finally viable to send larger packets of data. And this might seem like a really boring incremental change on the face of it, but those data packets were now large enough to include photos and videos. That is what truly opened the floodgates for the camera phone. Now there's some controversy over which was actually the first camera phone, because there's two contenders, both from Japanese companies. The Kyocera Visual Phone VP210 was technically the first phone with a camera, but it couldn't send photos over mobile data or SMS. Which is why Sharp then came in and claimed that their J-phone, J-SH04, the names are fantastic, was the first true camera phone, because it could. This was the first time that the camera and the phone aspects were truly integrated. And the camera quality? An absolutely astounding 0.11 megapixels, capable of taking images that look like this. Even has a tiny little mirror right next to the lens, so you can take selfies? Not that anyone would have a clue what you were talking about if you said the word selfie at the time. But the most unbelievable part of this whole thing? No one believed in the idea of a camera phone. Sharp took the concept to Japan's biggest mobile providers, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, but they both rejected the idea. So Sharp only managed to get picked up by the smallest operator, J-Phone, who still was so cautious that they only initially agreed to release 2,000 of the total 10,000 units of this phone with a camera. So the whole other 8,000 looked like this. And obviously... They were wrong. The camera phone took off. These 2000 units sold out within weeks, while the camera-less variants? They sat on the shelves, gathering dust. And once one phone had a camera, suddenly every phone needed one. Then a colour screen. Then MP3 ringtones. The early 2000s turned into a features arms race. And nobody was winning harder than Nokia. Which was a bit of a problem for the company that started this whole thing. Motorola. Who, having dismissed 2G when it was first up and coming, clinging to 1G because it had better coverage at the time, were lagging behind by this point. They had not a lot to lose and everything to gain. So a small team inside the company made a bet. What if the next big leap isn't something that a phone can do but how it makes you feel? This is the Motorola RAZR V3 and I feel like royalty. The retail box is nice enough but look at this press package it was handed out in. One of the many incredible things that I've only been able to touch thanks to the Mobile Phone Museum. Goodness me. That is so unbelievably thin, especially for a phone that has not one, but two displays on it. And a camera too. Although I've only got it working on my beautifully bright pink version over here. I mean, it's not amazing. It's a 0.3 megapixel, but I mean, oh my God, you can use the cover screen. Why did that functionality exist in 2004? Consider me bamboozled. That is crazy. So, can I use the volume buttons to capture? Oh, uh... Nope, that's just zooming in further and further into my face. This feels so ahead of its time that people wouldn't know what to do with it. I can't stress how insane it is that this phone even happened. Because the thing is, Motorola had an internal policy. They only decided to make a phone if they could reliably predict 3 million sales. And I mean, there's no way that something entirely new like this was gonna be able to guarantee that. So the only way to get this RAZR made There was a lead engineer, and him and his team worked evenings, they worked weekends. This wasn't even brought up at project review meetings. And the only way it made it into production was by this team getting a few specific higher-ups who believed in the project onto their side. Well, aren't Motorola lucky? Because the RAZR went on to not just hit the 3 million threshold, But absolutely blow it up, selling over 100 million units. This was the best-selling phone of 2005, 2006, and 2007 in the US. Anyone who was anyone had a RAZR, which makes sense when you see just how much of a fashion statement this was. I mean, just look at the electro-luminescent keypad, made from a single thin wafer of metal. Or the genuinely stunning interface, where... Everything feels so alive compared to just a few years back, and while not power-focused, it did still trounce the last decade with about three times the performance of the communicator, enough to be able to play a wider gamut of games, including Splinter Cell. Apparently. So weird seeing a Ubisoft logo on a phone like this. It's still 2D, but there's a hell of a lot more going on here than what we've seen before. It's even weather effects. I can imagine at the time being extremely gassed that you could play something like this on your phone. This is easily Motorola's most iconic phone of all time. So much so that the company was still hearkening back to it as late as 2020. But let's not get ahead of ourselves because this is also kind of the problem. Motorola had found a winning formula with the Razr Kept selling it for four years. Same phone, but just with new colors and lower prices. Meanwhile, Nokia had been cooking. Remember that features arms race that I was talking about? Well, in 2006, at the dawn of the biggest shift in mobile phone history, Nokia ended it. With the N95. Because if you think about the gear that you'd have been carrying around in 2006, a sat-nav, an mp3 player, digital camera, maybe a camcorder, and a phone, this thing is all five of them. It has actual GPS built in with maps of over 150 countries available for download. You've actually got this incredibly responsive 3D globe view. It's a proper mp3 player too, with a 3.5mm headphone jack and stereo speakers. Oh my god that sounds really really good. I mean the 2000s was like peak mp3 season so you can just so see how with this phone Nokia was just trying to kill everyone, including the iPod which was like the most popular at the time and didn't even have speakers at all. And we're not done because it's a damn good camera. You remember how just five years ago we were celebrating that 0.1 megapixel sensor? This is five megapixels with autofocus. And it takes video, there's even a selfie camera, but it's not called that, it's a secondary camera and you activate it by going into a sub menu, which just seems so funny to me. Oh yeah, and this whole all-in-one multimedia computer concept didn't end at the software. People had seen a sliding phone at this point, but never in history A dual sliding phone. You slide the screen up to get the keypad, but you can now also slide it down to get bespoke music control buttons. So these mean that no matter what else I'm doing on the phone, I can still instantly pause, play, and skip through my jams. And then, with the release of the 8GB revision later in the year, You could also watch YouTube videos. All while completely pulverizing the Moto Razr in performance. Best estimates suggest 10 times more power. So compared to the beginning, we've already reached a staggering 300,000x. Okay, asphalt it is. Wow. I mean, it's our first taste of 3D gaming on a phone. Definitely a level up from Splinter Cell. It's actually mad to think that... All the modern features from an Asphalt game are still completely intact. You still gather the fuel tanks, you still crash into cars, you still have different levels of nitro. This is very playable, and in some points I would actually go as far as to say, pretty. So, if you wanted the best of the best at the time, you had a Nokia. That, or... A BlackBerry. Now BlackBerry had only started 8 years prior, with pages and phones that looked like this. But they accelerated in popularity, faster than any other brand, with their great battery life, 5 hours of talk time, satisfying keyboard, and then BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, to make the most of it. Now BBM was a game changer. It was basically the first fast, free, direct messaging service. WhatsApp before WhatsApp. Unfortunately for BlackBerry, Their glory days were short-lived, because very soon after hitting their stride, it was time for Steve Jobs at Apple to take to the stage. An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it? Now, clearly, people in the crowd were impressed and surprised and entertained by the iPhone. And look at this thing. It would be hard to argue that Apple hadn't absolutely nailed the aesthetics of both the body and the user interface of what was initially called iPhone OS. And I would attribute a lot of that to its skeuomorphic design, where everything looks like its real-life counterpart. It made mobile phones suddenly feel intuitive to a lot of people who were previously overwhelmed by them. You know, when we look back, knowing what smartphones have become, the reveal of the first iPhone seems like the single moment that everything suddenly changed. But I think what's really interesting is that's not what it felt like in the moment. The iPhone launched into a world that, just like the first phones that came without antenna rods, wasn't ready for it. But your kids are gonna love it. Reviews were actually mixed at the time. Some praised the multi-touch display and the fact that the web browser felt as close to a desktop as a phone has gotten. But TechRadar called the iPhone's slow edge network connection a deal breaker, which is completely fair because edge was still a 2G technology using the same narrow radio channels that have been active since the 90s. 3G got brand new ones, 25 times wider. Oh, and the existing Nokia N95 And there were many concerned parties, like New York Times, who found typing on the iPhone frustrating and didn't see it beating a BlackBerry. Plus all the tech enthusiasts, bummed by this 2 megapixel camera with no autofocus. Just to give you an idea, let's take the same photo on iPhone versus Nokia. Oh yeah. I would definitely rather have the Nokia's photo. iPhone's pretty grainy. So while the original iPhone wasn't a flop, it was also far from an instant knockout at retail. It didn't hit analysts' sales forecasts, people were having a nightmare trying to activate the things, and Apple even decided to drop the price of the iPhone by $200 to convince people it was worth it. Which then meant that they had to give the early adopters who'd paid full price a $100 store credit to say sorry. It was dire enough that the entire company's value tanked. By $7 billion in a single day. And I think this is largely because the thing that would turn the iPhone into the success story that it was, the App Store, didn't exist at this point. That came a full year and a half after the original announcement. Now, the idea of an App Store was not at all new, but it's the way that Apple did it that made it fly. Because before Apple, getting your app onto a phone... was a mess. The stores were mostly run by the carriers so you needed their permission just to get it listed. If you did get in they'd take 40 to 50 percent of every sale. You'd often have to rebuild your app over and over again for all the different permutations of phones out there and you go through all that effort your app is still most likely buried in some menu that most people never even opened. So think about that being the precedent and then imagine what it was like with Apple stepping on stage and saying make your app once and it works on every single iPhone. Displaying in exactly the way you've imagined for all users. They said, you set the price, you keep 70%. We'll only take 30. And if you want to make your app free, then it's going to cost you nothing. Oh yeah, and every single iPhone user gets direct, immediate access to see your apps right there on the home screen. You can see why it blew up, right? Now, if the rest of the industry wasn't panicking after seeing the iPhone, I think it's fair to say they were all shaking in their boots seeing the App Store take off. Because, I mean, if every developer flocks to Apple, every user is going to follow them. And at that point, it wouldn't matter how good anyone else's phone was. And so the time had come for Android. But the funny thing is, most people assume Android was Google's answer to the iPhone. But it wasn't. Android started in 2003 as a tiny startup building an operating system for digital cameras. That market turned out to be too small, so they then pivoted to phones, which is when, in 2005, Google quietly bought the entire company for $50 million. Yes, possibly the best $50 million any company has ever spent. But that was not even the biggest pivot, because by the start of 2007, Google had spent two years then building their first Android phone. It looked like this. A keyboard, a tiny screen, no touch. It was a BlackBerry competitor. But then Steve Jobs walked on stage. The head of Android, Andy Rubin, was in a car in Las Vegas as that first iPhone launch was happening. He had the driver pull over so he could watch the keynote, and when it finished he reportedly said, I guess we're not going to ship that phone. So in that moment, Google turned all of their efforts away towards their other prototype device. A touchscreen phone, codenamed Dream. And 21 months later, three months after Apple's App Store debut, it arrived. The HTC Dream. And you can feel the identity crisis. It's a touchscreen, like the iPhone, but slide it... And it's still got that Blackberry DNA. Plus a trackball. Plus whatever this chin thing is. And at launch, there was no such thing as an Android on-screen keyboard. If you wanted to type a single letter, you had to open it. This feels distinctly more scrapped together than the iPhone. But the reason that Google still succeeded is that it wasn't really about this phone. See, unlike Apple, who kept their software exclusive to iPhones, Google did the exact opposite. They gave Android away, actively trying to get it into as many companies' hands as possible. And this changed the world. Because suddenly every phone manufacturer who'd been quivering at the growing threat from the iPhone had a platform to unite around. This wasn't HTC Dream versus iPhone. This was almost everyone against the iPhone. This was Motorola. This was Sony Ericsson. Even companies like ZTE making budget devices. Like my first ever smartphone, the ZTE Blade. I have a lot to be grateful for for this phone. And so the sheer volume that Android had on its side meant that very quickly the Android user base flew past Apple's. And when you combine that with Google's even more open approach to developers saying, you make an app, we don't even need to approve it. You can just post it onto the Android market. Android development kicked off very quickly, enough to eventually catch up with the iPhone's headstart. And the rest was history. Every phone company who wasn't Apple sooner or later realized that They couldn't survive without Android. Nokia really tried to steer away. They made a big bet on Windows Phone instead. But that plummeted so hard that within seven years of the N95, they'd sold their entire phone business to Microsoft. And Microsoft lost basically all of it. And even Samsung couldn't escape. As much as this company tried over the years to build their own operating system, it never took off. Because ultimately, Android was the only way that they could provide their users with this gigantic ecosystem of apps. So, in 2011, Samsung found a different way to innovate that the entire industry thought was a joke. At this point, the smartphone market had started to stabilize. Phones were somewhere between this big and this big. The iPhone was slightly on the smaller side with a 3.5 inch display. Samsung's Galaxy S2 was on the larger side with a 4.3 inch display. Anything bigger than this I mean, that would just be silly. In fact, just a year earlier, Steve Jobs had been on stage trying to explain away the iPhone 4's signal problems. He admitted that a bigger phone would have fixed it, but that Apple hadn't made one because in his words, no one's going to buy that. He even had a name for big Android phones at the time, Hummers. Clearly though, Samsung didn't give two hoots because in 2011, they strolled on stage and pulled out the final boss of Hummers, the Galaxy S6. Note, it had a stylus, the other thing that Steve Jobs said nobody wanted, and at 5.3 inches was so preposterously large that they called it a new category of product, which later became known as a phablet. And this wasn't actually necessarily a compliment. Reviews were very mixed. Wired gave it a 4 out of 10. Gizmodo gave it a 2.5. And ZDNet's review said you'd look faintly ridiculous making a call on it. You'll notice how polarizing reviews are a common thread for devices that end up changing the world. Because what the critics missed is that what a phone was going to become capable of was just about to change, thanks to 4G. This used even wider channels than 3G and also multiple antennae at both the phone end and the tower end, so you could send more than one stream of data at a time. Which unlocked video streaming. Very quickly the smartphone became a comfortable way to watch YouTube, Netflix, and if you're watching, bigger screens and bigger batteries are just better. Not to mention that if the original iPhone was 25% faster than the Nokia N95, and then the HTC Dream was 25% faster than that, the Galaxy Note, with its cutting edge dual core chip and full gigabyte of RAM, sits around 10 times the power of that phone. Which meant people weren't just using their phones to Drink virtual beer anymore. We were playing first-person shooters like Dead Trigger and console-like racing games. Yet more reasons to want a super-sized display. And just to see how far cameras have come in the last few years, this thing has an eight megapixel sensor and... Oh my god, yeah that has completely buried the Nokia N95. So this is a multimedia revolution, no doubt, but it's also around when the 1G problem comes back. Remember how anyone with a scanner could listen in on early calls, and 2G fixed it by scrambling your voice into numbers? Well, the thing is, the moment that your phone became a bank, and a shopping cart, and a media machine, that data going to the And that is exactly what Surfshark, our sponsor, fixes. Instead of just scrambling your voice, it scrambles everything leaving your phone, before it reaches any third parties. And do you remember the Dynatac era was all about making your phone number belong to you? Well 40 years on, we kind of have the opposite problem. Everyone has it. So Surfshark's personal data masking gives you a fake email and number to hand out instead. So when some random app gets breached, it's the fake one that leaks. And going to surfshark.com slash boss, or using the code boss, gives you four extra months of Surfshark. That's less than two dollars a month for an unlimited number of users. Now, the ultimate proof that Samsung was onto something with the big screen? Just three years after no one's going to buy that, Apple themselves started making plus-sized phones. As did basically every other company. But that created a brand new problem, because hands were not getting any bigger. If you wanted more screen, you couldn't keep making phones indefinitely larger. So you had to start deleting everything on the front that wasn't screened. Xiaomi arguably got there first with the Mi Mix in 2016. Samsung sort of followed with the Galaxy S8, where they finally ditched the physical home button. And then in September 2017, ten years after the original iPhone, Apple all but closed the previous chapter. With the iPhone X, This really was a landmark phone for a number of reasons. It had tiny bezels all the way around, achieved by actually bending the display over itself at the edges. Meaning that this very holdable phone actually had a larger screen area than this enormous ceiling phone. With no home button, Apple had to come up with Face ID. And it's pretty incredible that they nailed this tech in its first attempt. I would say instantly becoming better than the Touch ID they'd been iterating on for years. But it did also mean the notch, which was a funny chapter. Journalists hated it, other brands mocked it, especially Samsung, and then pretty much every company adopted it, in some shape or form. The iPhone X's brand new Apple-designed hexa-core CPU was about 12 times faster than the first Galaxy Note, paired with graphics that are up to 40 times, so we'll conservatively call this a 20 times overall improvement in capability. Which all meant that, largely, this was a well-received phone. However, in worse news, it was also famously the first mainstream flagship to cost straight up $1,000. And as soon as Apple broke that barrier, of course other companies gleefully followed. But once the whole front of the phone is screen, how does the pursuit for larger displays continue? Well... Gotta make it bend, which in 2017 sounded like pure science fiction. And yet, just two years later, it was a real product with a real price tag from the same company that everyone laughed at for making phones too big in the first place. And would you believe it? Mixed reviews. People were surprised that it actually worked at all. That for something so sci-fi, it didn't feel like a prototype. But at the same time, there were durability concerns. And rightfully so. Review units started breaking within days of reaching journalists. Partly because they peeled off what looked like a screen protector, but was actually the top layer of the display. But partly also because debris just found its way into the phone through the hinge. So Samsung pulled every unit, they went right back to the drawing board, and then relaunched five months later. But that messy launch turned out to be a starting gun. Because seven years on from that, we're now seeing foldables that make even that sci-fi concept look primitive. Like Samsung's latest Z Fold 8 Ultra is a massive 48% thinner. The cover screen is literally two times the size in basically the same footprint. If you're curious how much the cameras have improved since the OG, significantly. Very significantly, from 12 megapixel to 200 megapixel, in fact, fueled at least in part by the increasing prevalence of creators. And in what's got to be one of the greatest 180s of the century, Apple. You know the company that originally said, no one's going to buy a big phone? Well, they made a foldable too, with, sorry Steve, Stylus support. Who wants a stylus? And in terms of performance, oh my goodness. A modern day top of the line smartphone, if we average the CPU and GPU, is about 10 times phones like the iPhone X. And as these numbers start to compound, the gap versus the very original phones becomes absolutely incomprehensibly large. Not to mention. 5G, which uses much shorter radio waves than 4G, that can carry data more than 20 times faster, providing your own range of a 5G mmWave tower. If you think about how all of this started just 42 years ago... It's an absolute miracle. From a phone that needed 10 hours of charging to give you 30 minutes of talking, to phones now where 10 hours of charging could get you 300 hours of talking. From a 0.1 megapixel camera to 200 megapixels, 2,000 times the resolution. From 9.6 kilobits per second data speeds to over 4 gigabits today. 400,000 times. And from a chip that you'd find in a digital watch to something nearly a billion times more capable today. But, you know what didn't change in those 42 years? Focus Group said a phone had to have an antenna sticking out the top. Japan's biggest network said no one wants a camera on their phone. Motorola's own bosses thought the Razr would fail. Apple had to cut the iPhone's price within two months. The Galaxy Note got reviewed a 2.5 out of 10, the fold, Broke in testers' hands. Every single phone that ended up creating meaningful change started out as something people laughed at. Revolution is always made by those willing to brave the ridicule.