There was, I had one such - mind, I also had (still have in the loft) one of those analogue phones, complete with its curly lead to the base part and a massive battery under it, which you carried like a small suitcase.
Yes my first GSM phone was a Siemens S3 that took the whole credit-card sized SIM.
It had an 0468 voda number at a time when all mobiles supposed to be migrating to the 04 range ... that plan seemed to disappear with the current 07 range.
Given that smartphone tech progress has stalled, I am foreseeing a period of consolidation.
Given how important smartphones have become, the key remaining are to address is battery life. How to extend. I think future developments will be in battery chemistry, CPUs taking (even) less power, and an overall drive for apps to be as lean as possible.
The other way to give an illusion of longer battery life is to have 2 identical smartphones, you can just swap over in the hall before you leave the house. The "identical" bit is what iTunes and Google Play have already started implementing. Certainly my last (Android) smartphone only needed signing into my Google account to be able to sync everything.
Of course that becomes a whole lot easier when you have virtual SIMs ... at which point other developments alluded to in this thread make sense.
I suspect law enforcement would be chuffed to bits with an infrastructure that lets them clone a phone without ever needing to access it ....
Recent mobile O/S tend to force the apps to be more frugal with power (co-ordinating periods of network or GPS access between apps) so screens are the power hog and they still seem to be getting bigger and higher resolution, I guess that will undo any increases in battery capacity.
Dunno. If we assume we have reached the limit (for whatever reason) for battery *capacity* and device optimisation, the next area to ameliorate the effects of battery drain are quick charging. Battery life becomes less of an issue if you can recharge in 5 minutes.
I can see "a week" being some sort of marketing (if not technical) milestone. A phone that can go a week without charge would be a big selling point. (although it does beg the question as to what a "week" is. I suspect in Marketing Towers, it's *5* days ....)
quite a number of enhancements have had to be retrofitted into the standard to make them usable today. For example the original sim cards only allowed access to their data storage via a slow (about 9k6 bps IIRC) serial link. This was fine when it was 4KB and designed to store some phone numbers. Not practical for offloading 20GB of images!
I recall there being a data transfer protocol for the Psion PDAs that someone developed that allowed file transfers using data packets encoded into SMS messages. It was particularly novel a the time since SMS messages were free!
(i.e. before the world had got the idea of "texts", and most phones had no or very crude support on their UIs for text, and the MNOs had not yet spotted a sales opportunity)
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