Has it become difficult to spend the day without a mobile?

S Venkateshwari
Has it become difficult to spend the day without a mobile?

More than 5 decades have passed since the mobile phone came into the world. On 3 april 1973, an engineer named Martin Cooper made the first call from a mobile phone while standing on the street of New York. Today there are more mobile phones in the world than the number of people.

Technology company IBM is credited with making the world's first smartphone. The name of this phone was Simon. It was available to the people in the market in the year 1994. It was a little big in appearance, but it had a touchscreen, email sending facility and some built-in apps, such as calculator and sketchpad.

But Simon also had some shortcomings. Its battery lasted only for one hour. It did not sell much either. Reports suggest that this phone remained in the stores for only six months and only about 50,000 phones were sold. Although Simon was not very successful, it definitely paved the way for the smartphones that were made in the future.

How many people in the world have smartphones today?

According to GSMA's 'State of mobile Internet Connectivity Report 2023' (SOMIC), more than half of the world's population (54%), i.e., about 4.3 billion people now have smartphones. 4.6 billion people in the world use mobile internet, of which about 4 billion people use internet through smartphones. This is almost half (49%) of the world's population. 600 million people (8%) use internet through feature phones.

This report tells for the first time what kind of mobile phones people are using to access the internet in different parts of the world. 69% smartphone users are using internet through 4G. 69% smartphone users in the southern part of Africa and 33% smartphone users in the Middle east and North Africa are still using internet through 3G.

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