Chapter 1: The mobile ecosystem

(By Mario Linares-Vásquez)

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(Image from https://www.androidcentral.com/sites/androidcentral.com/files/styles/larger/public/article_images/2017/04/motorola_dpc550.jpg)

You may wonder what type of pre-historian device is the one in the figure above. It is a Motorola's MicroTAC, which is considered as the world's first pocket phone. The MicroTAC introduced the first flip phone design into the market. In the ancient times (i.e., the nineties), the flip phones were very cool and people used to have fun opening their phones like in the gif bellow, that is what grandpa told me (click on the image to start the gif):

_(Free gif from giphy.com)_

The history of mobile devices goes back to the portable AM radios produced by the U.S. Army corps (1938) and the SCR-300 radio transceivers (1940) developed by Motorola for the U.S. Military. However, the first handheld devices were introduced by Motorola in 1973 (earlier mobile phones were installed in vehicles). Do you know what was the weight of that device? Dude, it was 1.1kg. Take a quick look to the "A visual history of the mobile phone" article published by Bussiness Insider; there is no need to read the whole article, we want you just to see the differences between the devices:

http://www.businessinsider.com/complete-visual-history-of-cell-phones-2011-5?op=1

Nowadays, mobile devices are considered "smart" in the sense that are provided with high computing capabilities and hardware components that can gather different signals/data from the environment or can monitor different bio-metric signals. In addition to mobile devices, there is a plethora of wearable devices (i.e., technology that is worn on the human body) such as smart watches, activity trackers (e.g., fitbit). Even ovens, TVs, fridges, and wash machines, are programmable and have interfaces for interconnectivity.

Mobile devices and wearable devices are "smart" now, and they are becoming technological extensions of our bodies. The IoT (Internet of Things) dream is being realized quickly and we are getting closer. However, this book is about mobile app development; so no worries, we will not contribute too much to the rise of the machines over the humans.