219 Fun Facts About Phone

What did Alexander Graham Bell say in the first intelligible telephone call?

'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you' was the line; Bell later refused to keep a telephone in his study, calling his invention an intrusion on his real work.

In which city was Alexander Graham Bell born in 1847?

Edinburgh was Bell's birthplace in 1847; the family left for Canada in 1870 after tuberculosis had killed both of his brothers.

What happened across North American telephone networks during Bell's funeral in 1922?

Service observed a moment of silence: every phone in North America was silenced as Bell was buried on the Nova Scotia estate he had made his home after falling for the place on a family holiday.

Which Italian inventor's telephone work was acknowledged by a US House resolution in 2002?

Antonio Meucci filed a patent caveat in 1871 but let it lapse after 1874; the House resolution said that had he paid the $10 fee to keep it alive, no patent could have gone to Bell.

Which German inventor built an electric 'Telephon' in 1861, fifteen years before Bell's patent?

Johann Philipp Reis called his 1861 device the 'Telephon'; it turned sound into electrical impulses, and Edison later named him the first inventor of a telephone, though 'only musical not articulating'.

Almon Strowger, who patented the automatic telephone exchange in 1891, worked in which trade?

Strowger was an undertaker in Kansas City who, the story goes, believed an operator was steering his callers to a rival; his 1891 patent led to the first automatic exchange at La Porte, Indiana, in 1892.

Why did old rotary dials carry letters as well as numbers?

The letters were there to represent telephone exchange names such as PEnnsylvania 6-5000, dialled as 736-5000; all-number calling took over once the supply of usable names ran short.

Touch-Tone push-button dialling made its public debut at which event?

The 1962 Seattle World's Fair let the public try Touch-Tone at the Bell pavilion; President Kennedy later keyed '1964' on a push-button phone to start the countdown to the 1964 World's Fair.

Which city introduced 999, the world's first emergency telephone number, on 30 June 1937?

London launched 999 on 30 June 1937, prompted by a 1935 Wimpole Street house fire in which callers could not reach the operator quickly enough.

The first arrest made through a 999 call, a week after its 1937 launch, was for what?

Burglary: a week after the launch a woman dialled 999 about an intruder and police caught Thomas Duffy within five minutes, though the number had been devised to reach the fire brigade faster.

Which number is the standard emergency number on GSM mobile networks worldwide and across the EU?

112 is written into the GSM standard, so handsets can dial it even when locked, and networks in countries such as the US and Australia pass it on to the local emergency number.

Outside films and TV, North America's 555 exchange has traditionally been used for which real service?

Directory assistance, on 555-1212, was the exchange's one traditional use, which left its other numbers free for fiction; only 555-0100 to 555-0199 are now officially reserved for that.

The coin payphone's inventor is said to have had the idea in 1888 after struggling to phone whom?

A doctor: the story goes that nobody would lend William Gray a telephone when his wife fell ill, so he devised a coin-operated one, first installed at a Hartford bank in 1889.

Britain's red telephone kiosks, including the K6 of 1935, were designed by which architect?

Giles Gilbert Scott won the 1924 kiosk competition and designed the K6 for George V's 1935 Silver Jubilee; he wanted his kiosk silver with a greeny-blue interior, but the Post Office painted it red.

Which 1960s spy comedy used a phone booth as a secret entrance to headquarters?

Get Smart (1965–70) opened with Maxwell Smart dropping into CONTROL headquarters through the floor of a phone booth; Superman used booths for costume changes.

Roughly how much did the DynaTAC 8000X, the first handheld cell phone, cost when it went on sale?

$4,000, near enough: the DynaTAC 8000X listed at $3,995, about seven months' pay on the US minimum wage of the day, after a decade spent turning the 1973 prototype into a product.

What nickname did the DynaTAC's bulky shape earn it?

The brick was users' name for the DynaTAC 8000X, close in size and weight to a clay house brick; the label later stuck to any bulky early handset once smaller phones arrived in the 1990s.

The world's first commercial cellular network, launched in Tokyo in 1979, served what kind of phone?

Car phones were all it served when the first cellular network opened in Tokyo in 1979: no handheld cell phone went on sale anywhere until the 1980s.

What did the world's first SMS text message, sent on 3 December 1992, say?

'Merry Christmas' was typed by engineer Neil Papworth on a computer and sent over Vodafone's network to Richard Jarvis's Orbitel 901 handset on 3 December 1992.

How did German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand arrive at the 160-character SMS limit?

He typed sentences and counted: nearly all ran under 160 characters, and the postcards and Telex messages his committee checked were just as short, so 160 became the limit.

Which predictive-text system let people type words on a numeric keypad with one press per letter?

T9, short for Text on 9 keys, began in 1987 as an accessible typing system driven by eye tracking; in 1995 its inventors noticed that phone keypads grouped the alphabet the same way.

Roughly how many Nokia 3310 handsets were sold after its launch in 2000?

126 million Nokia 3310s were sold, making it one of the most successful phones ever; its tough casing later became an internet joke, with fans calling the handset indestructible.

Which game came pre-loaded on the Nokia 3310 and became an icon of early mobile gaming?

Snake II came on the Nokia 3310 with three other games; the original Snake's creator, Taneli Armanto, had first tried to build a Tetris-style game, but rights problems pushed him to the snake idea.

The Motorola Razr V3, released in 2004, holds which sales record?

Best-selling clamshell phone of all time, at a widely cited 130 million units: the Razr V3 launched in 2004 as an exclusive fashion phone and took off only after its price was cut.

Which Canadian company, based in Waterloo, Ontario, launched the first BlackBerry in 1999?

Research In Motion introduced the BlackBerry 850, a two-way pager, in 1999; the product came to define its maker so completely that in 2013 the company renamed itself BlackBerry.

What addiction-themed nickname for the BlackBerry was Webster's New World Word of the Year for 2006?

'CrackBerry' was Webster's New World College Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2006, a nod to the phone's addictive pull; a decade later the company had stopped making its own handsets.

Which US president insisted on keeping his BlackBerry in office?

Barack Obama relied on his BlackBerry through the 2008 campaign and, told that security and legal worries meant giving it up as president, fought to keep one after his inauguration.

Whom did engineer Martin Cooper phone in the first public handheld cell phone call, in 1973?

His rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel, took the call: Cooper announced that he was speaking from a real handheld cellular telephone.

Where did Steve Jobs unveil the first iPhone on 9 January 2007?

At Macworld Expo on 9 January 2007, Jobs teased three products – a widescreen iPod, a phone and an internet communicator – before revealing they were one.

What did Apple give early iPhone buyers after its 2007 price cut?

A $100 credit at Apple's stores went to early buyers after 'hundreds of emails' of protest: the 8 GB iPhone had dropped from $599 to $399 two months after going on sale.

Which magazine named the original iPhone its Invention of the Year for 2007?

Time magazine named the iPhone its Invention of the Year for 2007, even though the first model shipped without picture messaging or third-party apps.

Why did Android's founders drop their original 2003 plan to build software for digital cameras?

The camera market was too small, a founder later said, so the team turned its system into a phone platform; Google bought the start-up in 2005, a purchase an executive called its 'best deal ever'.

Which smartphone, sold by T-Mobile as the G1 in 2008, was the first to run Google's new OS?

HTC Dream paired a touchscreen with a keyboard; Google's first prototype had been a BlackBerry-style phone with no touchscreen at all, a plan rethought after the iPhone appeared in 2007.

Which was the last dessert name Google gave a version of its mobile operating system, in 2018?

Pie, version 9, was the last; from version 10 Google switched to plain numbers, explaining that spoken dessert names were unclear in languages where L and R sound alike.

Under which name did the DynaTAC's inventor company release the first popular flip phone in 1996?

StarTAC weighed about 88 grams, so little that its maker sold it as a 'wearable' phone, to be carried in a holster like an accessory to your clothes.

Which pseudonym did Alexander Graham Bell use when writing for National Geographic magazine?

H. A. Largelamb is an anagram of A. Graham Bell; he was the National Geographic Society's second president, from 1898 to 1903.

Which invention did Bell rate at least as highly as his telephone?

Photophone: it carried speech on a beam of light in 1880 and Bell prized it, yet it never became a working rival to the telephone, and its principles found practical use only decades later.

Which Chinese electronics company made BlackBerry-branded phones under licence from 2016 to 2020?

TCL made BlackBerry-branded phones such as the KEYone from 2016 to 2020, after BlackBerry itself gave up building handsets to concentrate on security software.

Which country was the first to launch commercial GSM digital mobile service, in 1991?

Finland's Radiolinja opened the first commercial GSM network on 1 July 1991; former prime minister Harri Holkeri marked the day with a ceremonial call to the deputy mayor of Tampere.

What did the 2017 Nokia 3310 relaunch add to the original?

A colour screen, with a two-megapixel camera, came with the €49 relaunch, but its selling point was old-fashioned: a battery lasting up to a month on standby.

The word 'telephone' combines Greek words meaning what?

Distant voice: tēle is far and phōnē voice, and the word is older than Bell's device, having already named megaphones and a foghorn-like signal for ships.

The 'lovers' telephone', an early acoustic device, was studied in the 1660s by which British scientist?

Robert Hooke wrote in 1665 that he had sent sound 'to a very considerable distance in an instant', far faster than it travelled through the air.

Alexander Graham Bell built a metal detector in 1881 to search for a bullet in which US president?

James Garfield was shot in July 1881, and Bell's electrical probe searched for the bullet to no avail; the president died that September, though Bell later showed doctors that the device worked.

Which two women in Bell's family were deaf, profoundly shaping his work?

His mother, Eliza, began losing her hearing when he was 12, and he learned a finger language to tap conversations out for her; his wife, Mabel, had been deaf since a childhood bout of scarlet fever.

Who broke ground for Bell's Volta Bureau, his centre for the deaf, in 1893?

Helen Keller turned the first sod for the Volta Bureau; she later dedicated her autobiography to Bell, who had pointed her father to the school that sent Anne Sullivan to teach her.

Besides the telephone, Bell did ground-breaking later work in hydrofoils and what other field?

Aeronautics filled Bell's later years: his man-carrying tetrahedral kites flew from 1907, and his Aerial Experiment Association built the Silver Dart, which made Canada's first powered flight in 1909.

Bell's assistant Thomas Watson, rich from telephone royalties, founded a Massachusetts yard in which industry?

Shipbuilding: Watson left the telephone business in 1881, failed at farming, then began building marine engines and later warships at his Fore River yard.

Which rival's telephone caveat reached the US Patent Office on the same day in 1876 as Bell's patent application?

Elisha Gray's lawyer filed his caveat for a liquid-transmitter telephone on 14 February 1876, the day Bell's application went in; Bell got the patent, and who was truly first is still argued over.

Which greeting did Alexander Graham Bell favour for answering the telephone?

Ahoy ahoy was Bell's choice, borrowed from ships; 'hello' won out, and The Simpsons' Mr Burns later revived 'ahoy-hoy' as a joke.

Who suggested 'Hello!' as a telephone greeting in an August 1877 letter?

Thomas Edison proposed it in a letter of 15 August 1877 to a Pittsburgh telegraph boss, arguing that no call bell would be needed because 'Hello!' could be heard 10 to 20 feet away.

Emma Nutt became the world's first female telephone operator in 1878 in which city?

Boston is where Emma Nutt started as an operator on 1 September 1878; the teenage boys hired before her had been impatient, cursed and played pranks.

The first telephone speaking clock service began in 1933 in association with which observatory?

Paris Observatory's director Ernest Esclangon started it on 14 February 1933, reportedly to spare his staff the stream of telephone calls asking for the exact time.

Candlestick telephones, common from the 1890s to the 1940s, held the receiver where when idle?

The receiver hung in the switch hook fork on the side of the upright stand; lifting it closed the hook switch and connected the line.

The Western Electric model 500 was the Bell System's standard desk phone from 1950 until what event?

The 1984 divestiture broke up the Bell System and ended the model 500's reign; until then the Bell companies had owned the phones and leased them to customers by the month.

Which two keys did the model 2500 telephone add in 1968?

Star and pound completed the 12-button keypad on the model 2500 in 1968; Bell's engineers added them because they pictured callers using telephones to reach computers.

The Princess telephone of 1959 was advertised with which slogan?

'It's little...It's lovely...It lights' sold the 1959 Princess phone and its glowing dial; the set proved so light that it slid about during dialling, so a lead weight was offered to hold it down.

Which industrial designer's firm created the Trimline telephone, introduced in 1965?

Henry Dreyfuss Associates moved the dial from the base into the handset for the Trimline, inventing a moving fingerstop to shrink the rotary dial enough to fit.

Rotary dials implement which signalling method?

Pulse dialling breaks the line once per unit of the digit, so dialling 5 sends five pulses; callers could even dial a number by rapidly tapping the receiver rest the right number of times.

Yellow pages directories organise businesses how?

Yellow pages list businesses by category, such as plumbers or florists; the first were printed on yellow paper in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1883 when a printer ran out of white stock.

The antitrust breakup of AT&T created seven regional phone companies known by what nickname?

Baby Bells was the nickname for the seven regional companies spun off on 1 January 1984; by the 2020s mergers had folded them into just three firms, among them AT&T itself and Verizon.

In the first transcontinental phone call, in 1915, Bell on the East Coast spoke to Watson in which city?

San Francisco: on 25 January 1915 Bell rang from the Atlantic coast, and Watson, who had left the telephone business back in 1881, returned to take the call at the far end of the continent.

Which Western Electric plant near Chicago, opened in 1905, gave its name to a productivity effect?

Hawthorne Works hosted 1920s lighting studies in which output rose when the lamps were brightened and rose again when they were dimmed, an effect later put down to workers knowing they were being observed.

Which Bell Labs satellite relayed the first live transatlantic television pictures in 1962?

Telstar, launched in July 1962, also carried telephone calls through space; within months, radiation from a US high-altitude nuclear test had crippled its electronics.

Under what ticker symbol does AT&T trade on the New York Stock Exchange?

'T' has an odd history: in 2005 the regional firm SBC bought its former parent, AT&T, then took the older company's name and its single-letter ticker for itself.

The Carterfone connected the telephone system to what?

The Carterfone coupled a two-way radio to a telephone handset acoustically; the FCC's 1968 ruling in its favour let customers attach their own devices to the network.

TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable, ran from Scotland to which Canadian province?

Newfoundland's Clarenville took the cable from Oban, Scotland, in 1956; from there the calls crossed to Nova Scotia by a second submarine cable before reaching the US and Canadian networks.

Before the TAT-1 cable opened in 1956, how were transatlantic telephone calls carried?

Radio links had carried transatlantic calls since 1927, but they were costly and at the mercy of magnetic storms; the cable brought 36 dependable circuits.

Which UN agency, founded in 1865 to coordinate telegraphs, now sets global telecommunications standards?

ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, began in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, which makes it far older than the United Nations and the oldest of the UN's agencies.

Phreak John Draper's 'Captain Crunch' nickname came from a cereal whistle emitting which tone?

2600 Hz was the tone that told the long-distance network a trunk line was idle, so a toy whistle could seize one; the hacker magazine 2600 takes its name from it.

Which future tech founders built and sold home-made blue boxes in the early 1970s?

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs: Wozniak designed the boxes and Jobs saw the business, selling them door to door in Berkeley dormitories years before the two founded Apple.

What did a 'blue box' let its illicit users do?

Make free long-distance calls: a blue box played the network's own control tones down the line, fooling it into connecting calls unbilled, until digital switching moved those signals out of the voice channel.

Which magazine published Ron Rosenbaum's 1971 article 'Secrets of the Little Blue Box' about phreaking?

Esquire ran Ron Rosenbaum's 'Secrets of the Little Blue Box' in October 1971; it leaned on interviews with John Draper, and the notoriety led to his arrest by the FBI in May 1972.

The DynaTAC 8000X needed a ten-hour charge to deliver roughly what talk time?

30 minutes of talk was all a ten-hour charge bought; inventor Martin Cooper said the battery life hardly mattered, because nobody could hold the phone up for that long.

Which 1989 handset, with a flip-down cover over its keypad, was designed to fit a shirt pocket?

MicroTAC was the smallest and lightest phone on sale in 1989; on later models the flip-down 'mouthpiece' was only a cover, because the microphone had moved into the body.

Which Chinese company bought Motorola's handset business from Google in 2014?

Lenovo paid Google $2.91 billion for Motorola Mobility in 2014; Google had spent $12.5 billion on it less than two years earlier and kept most of the patents it had bought it for.

Martin Cooper made the first public handheld cell phone call from a sidewalk in which city?

New York's Sixth Avenue was the spot: on 3 April 1973 Cooper showed the prototype to passers-by and reporters on his way to a press conference at the Hilton.

Which comedian made what was billed as the UK's first public mobile phone call, on 1 January 1985?

Ernie Wise rang Vodafone's headquarters from St Katharine Docks; it was reported in 2015 that the chairman's son, Michael Harrison, had made the real first call a few hours earlier.

Vodafone's takeover of which German company in 2000 ranks among the largest corporate takeovers in history?

Mannesmann, an old industrial group, had moved into telecoms only in 1990, yet that was what Vodafone wanted: it owned Germany's largest mobile network.

Bluetooth wireless is named after Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century king of which country?

Denmark's Harald Bluetooth united Denmark and Norway, so an Intel engineer proposed his name as the code name for a wireless standard meant to unite the PC and phone industries.

Twitter's original 140-character limit left 20 characters of a text message for what?

A username: Twitter capped posts at 140 characters so that each would fit in one 160-character text message, with the other 20 kept for the sender's name.

The 'M' in Kenya's M-Pesa stands for mobile; 'pesa' is Swahili for what?

'Pesa' is Swahili for money, so M-Pesa is mobile money; launched in Kenya in 2007, the service was credited by a 2016 study with lifting 194,000 Kenyan households out of extreme poverty.

Which Swedish company invented Bluetooth?

Ericsson engineer Jaap Haartsen developed Bluetooth in Lund in 1994; the name honours the 10th-century Danish king Harald Bluetooth, who united Scandinavian tribes.

Bluetooth's most common mode limits range to roughly what distance?

10 metres is the usual reach because most Bluetooth gadgets are battery-powered Class 2 devices limited to 2.5 milliwatts, a deliberate trade of range for low power use.

The W800 of 2005, from Sony's phone joint venture, was the first handset to carry which Sony brand?

Walkman was more than a badge on the W800: its music player worked with the phone switched off, so owners could keep listening through a flight.

What does the 'G' stand for in mobile network names such as 4G and 5G?

Generation: 5G is the fifth generation of cellular technology, and the label was back-dated, since the analogue networks of the 1980s were only named 1G after their digital successors arrived.

GSM, the digital standard that brought in text messaging, belongs to which class of mobile networks?

2G is GSM's class: European phone bodies designed it so that one handset would work in any member country, and it soon became ubiquitous across Europe.

What does the 'IMSI' stored on a SIM card identify?

The subscriber: IMSI stands for international mobile subscriber identity, the number a SIM presents to the network; 'IMSI catchers' used by law enforcement pose as cell towers to log the phones nearby.

Which satellite phone network is named after the 77 satellites first planned?

Iridium is the element with atomic number 77, the number of satellites first planned; the design was later trimmed to 66, but the name stayed.

Japan's i-mode mobile internet service was run by which operator?

NTT Docomo launched i-mode in February 1999 after teenagers had deserted its pagers for a rival; weather, news and ticket booking on a phone screen gave Japan a long lead in mobile internet.

Which symbol on Japan's Pocket Bell pagers won over teenagers in the mid-1990s and helped inspire emoji?

A heart on Pocket Bell pagers was so loved that when a later model dropped it, teenagers defected to a rival network; Shigetaka Kurita took the lesson and drew 176 emoji for phones in 1999.

The Japanese word 'emoji' literally combines 'e' (picture) with 'moji', meaning what?

'Moji' means character or letter, so emoji is literally 'picture character'; the resemblance to the English word 'emotion' is coincidence.

Nokia was originally established in 1865 as what kind of business?

A pulp mill on the Tammerkoski rapids was Fredrik Idestam's start in 1865; his second mill stood by the town of Nokia, which gave the company its name, and rubber and cables came decades later.

The Nokia ringtone is a phrase from Gran Vals, written in 1902 by Francisco Tárrega for which instrument?

Guitar was Tárrega's own instrument, and Gran Vals is a solo waltz for it; Nokia used the piece in a 1992 TV advert, then picked a short phrase as the ringtone that shipped on the 2110 in 1994.

Nokia's 1100 of 2003 was built for developing countries with which extra?

A flashlight was built in for places without much street lighting, alongside a sealed keypad and non-slip sides for dusty, humid climates; more than 250 million were sold.

Nokia's 3210 of 1999 was its first mass-market phone to do without what?

An external antenna was left off the 3210 although Nokia's own engineers were 'completely against' the idea; the team hid the aerial by redesigning the battery housing.

The Nokia 8110's curved shape earned it what nickname?

Banana phone was the nickname for the curved 8110; the cover that springs open in The Matrix was added for the film, because the phones sold in shops had to be slid open by hand.

The Nokia 9000 Communicator of 1996 ran on which processor, a chip first built for desktop PCs?

Intel i386 chips, familiar from 1980s desktop PCs, let the 9000 run the PC operating system GEOS, so in 1996 a phone could send faxes and browse the web.

Critics nicknamed Nokia's 2003 N-Gage after which food, because callers held its thin edge to the ear?

A taco was what the curved N-Gage resembled when held edge-on to the head, a pose mocked as 'sidetalking'; Nokia replaced it within a year with the redesigned N-Gage QD.

The Nokia N9 of 2011 was the only Nokia phone to run which operating system?

The N9 of 2011 ran MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan with a buttonless swipe interface; Nokia's Microsoft partnership that February meant no successor followed.

The Lumia name comes from a Finnish word meaning what?

Snow is 'lumi' in Finnish and 'lumia' is its plural form; Nokia's naming team tested the word in 84 dialects and kept it despite an obscure negative meaning in Spanish.

The 2017 Nokia 3310 revival was developed by which company?

HMD is a Finnish company formed by former Nokia executives, who licensed the brand in 2016 after Microsoft gave up on the phone business it had bought, then revived the 3310 a year later.

Vertu, the luxury phone brand Nokia launched in 1998, gave owners a dedicated key that reached what?

A 24-hour concierge answered the key to handle owners' bookings and errands; the handsets themselves were assembled by hand in England from titanium and sapphire crystal.

Symbian OS descended from EPOC, an operating system developed by which British company?

Psion wrote EPOC for its pocket computers; in 1998 the leading handset makers joined it to form Symbian, partly to stop Microsoft extending its desktop dominance to phones.

Which all-touch BlackBerry of 2013 was the first handset to run the BlackBerry 10 operating system?

The Z10 launched BlackBerry 10 in January 2013, with the keyboard-equipped Q10 close behind; within months the company wrote off nearly $1 billion, blamed almost entirely on unsold Z10s.

The first BlackBerry, launched in 1999, was a pager-sized device built mainly to handle what?

E-mail was the first BlackBerry's main job, on a device the size of a pager; its namers at Lexicon Branding said the small oval keys looked like the drupelets of a blackberry.

IBM's Simon of 1994 replaced the usual keypad with what?

A touchscreen worked with a stylus ran the Simon's calendar and fax; it sold about 50,000 in the US before a high price and a battery that lasted an hour helped end its run.

The IBM Simon ran an operating system compatible with what?

MS-DOS compatibility came from Datalight's ROM-DOS, yet owners never saw a DOS prompt: IBM hid it beneath its own icon-driven interface, called Navigator.

Under what name did T-Mobile sell the Danger Hiptop in the US?

Sidekick was T-Mobile's name for the Hiptop, which kept contacts and photos on its maker's servers; when those failed in October 2009, about 800,000 owners were cut off from their data.

The Treo smartphone line was originally developed by which company?

Handspring, founded by Palm's creators Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, launched the Treo line in 2002; Palm absorbed Handspring in 2003 and kept the name.

Which device replaced the Treo series in June 2009?

The Palm Pre launched on Sprint in June 2009 with a new system, webOS, but sales fell short of hopes and Palm was sold to Hewlett-Packard the following year.

Palm's webOS, first built for smartphones, was later acquired by which company for TVs?

LG bought webOS from HP in 2013, after HP had scrapped its own webOS devices just 49 days after its TouchPad tablet went on sale; LG then rebuilt the system for smart TVs.

Which Apple chief executive coined the term 'personal digital assistant' for the Newton?

John Sculley coined it in a 1992 trade-show speech in Las Vegas, the year before the Newton went on sale; its shaky handwriting recognition was soon mocked in Doonesbury, and Apple scrapped the line in 1998.

Windows Phone 7 replaced rows of app icons with which feature?

Live Tiles were squares that showed unread messages or the weather without opening an app; Microsoft took them to PCs with Windows 8, then dropped them in Windows 11.

Which of these did the first iPhone lack when it went on sale in June 2007?

Copy and paste did not reach the iPhone until a software update in 2009, two years after launch; the first model did ship with a camera, Wi-Fi and the Safari browser.

Before launch, the first iPhone's scratch-prone screen was replaced with which material?

Toughened glass came in after Apple's chief executive found his plastic prototype scratched from a day in his pocket; Corning revived a shelved formula in months, and it later sold as Gorilla Glass.

Apple's App Store opened the day before which iPhone went on sale?

The iPhone 3G arrived a day after the App Store opened with about 500 apps; Apple's chief executive had at first resisted third-party apps, telling developers to build web apps for Safari instead.

Which number did Apple skip entirely when naming its iPhones?

No iPhone 9 was ever released: Apple unveiled the 8 and a tenth-anniversary flagship on the same day, leaving the number between them unused.

Face ID debuted in November 2017 on which Apple handset?

The iPhone X gave up the home button so its screen could run edge to edge, which left no room for the fingerprint reader; a camera that maps the face took over the unlocking.

Apple's Lightning connector replaced the 30-pin dock connector alongside which handset in 2012?

The iPhone 5 swapped the 30-pin dock for the smaller, reversible Lightning plug, so years of speaker docks and chargers needed an adapter to fit the new phone.

The 'Dynamic Island' display cutout debuted on which Apple handsets in September 2022?

The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max turned the camera cutout into a feature: the pill-shaped Dynamic Island stretches to show calls, timers and music where earlier models had a fixed notch.

Apple's mobile operating system iOS was originally known by what name?

It was called iPhone OS for its first three versions; Apple shortened it to iOS in June 2010, licensing the name from a networking company whose router software had long been called IOS.

Android is based on a modified version of which kernel?

Linux sits beneath Android's own software, and the billions of Android phones in use give the kernel the largest installed base of any general-purpose operating system.

Google Play was formerly known as what?

Google Play was called Android Market from its 2008 launch until March 2012, when Google merged it with its music and ebook stores under the new name.

Google's Pixel phones replaced which earlier Google phone line in 2016?

Nexus phones were made with partner manufacturers and sold at modest prices; the Pixel that replaced them in 2016 launched at a 'Made by Google' event, priced against flagship rivals.

The Essential Phone of 2017 was designed by which Android co-founder?

Andy Rubin's Essential Phone had a titanium body and one of the first screen notches, but his company shut down in February 2020 having released only that one handset.

Amazon's only smartphone, launched in 2014 with head-tracking cameras for a 3D effect, carried which name?

The Fire Phone tracked the user's head with four corner cameras to shift its 3D display, but Amazon wrote off $170 million on it within months and stopped selling it in 2015.

The HTC First of 2013 was the only Android phone pre-loaded with what?

The HTC First shipped with Facebook Home, a launcher that put the news feed on the lock screen; its carrier cut the price from $99 to 99 cents within weeks.

Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 of 2016 was the company's first phone with which connector?

The Galaxy Note 7 of August 2016 was Samsung's first phone with a USB-C port and brought back the microSD slot; battery fires forced a full recall that October.

What did reviewers remove from Samsung's first Galaxy Fold, wrecking its screen?

The protective layer looked like a peel-off screen protector but was part of the folding display; Samsung delayed the launch from April to September 2019 and tucked its edges under the bezel.

From the Galaxy S22 through the S25 line, which Galaxy S model had a built-in S Pen slot?

The Ultra carried a built-in S Pen slot from the Galaxy S22 Ultra of 2022, inheriting the Note line's stylus; the Plus and base models went without.

Huawei was founded in Shenzhen in 1987 by which former PLA officer?

Ren Zhengfei, a former People's Liberation Army engineer, founded Huawei in Shenzhen in 1987 with about 21,000 yuan, initially reselling phone switches.

Xiaomi, sometimes called the 'Apple of China', was founded in 2010 by whom?

Lei Jun, once chief executive of software firm Kingsoft, co-founded Xiaomi in 2010; he had idolised Steve Jobs since a book on Silicon Valley gripped him as a student, and Xiaomi's sleek phones and stores drew the comparison.

Before OnePlus wrote its own OxygenOS, the OnePlus One of 2014 shipped outside China with which operating system?

Cyanogen OS, a commercial build of the hobbyist CyanogenMod, ran the OnePlus One until Cyanogen gave an Indian rival exclusive rights, briefly halting sales there; OnePlus answered with OxygenOS.

Which OnePlus co-founder left in 2020 to start the phone brand Nothing?

Carl Pei left OnePlus in October 2020 and launched Nothing with backers including iPod co-creator Tony Fadell; the new firm soon bought the name of the defunct Essential phone brand.

Ethical smartphone maker Fairphone is based in which country?

Fairphone, based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, builds modular phones whose parts owners can swap themselves, which is why iFixit has scored its handsets 10 out of 10 for repair.

Motorola's Razr name was revived in 2019 as what kind of device?

A foldable smartphone took the Razr name in 2019: its hinge let the 6.2-inch screen fold in half with no visible crease, and the price was about $1,500.

What nickname did the press give big-screen phones such as Samsung's 5.3-inch Galaxy Note of 2011?

Phablet, a blend of phone and tablet, stuck after the Galaxy Note; sceptics called it too big for a phone and too small for a tablet, yet it sold 10 million in nine months.

WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by two former engineers at which company?

Yahoo was where both men worked until 2007; they were then turned down for jobs at Facebook, which five years after WhatsApp's launch paid about $19 billion for it.

Skype was created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis and four developers from which country?

Estonia's Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn had already written the file-sharing program Kazaa for Zennström and Friis; with Toivo Annus they built Skype, which Microsoft closed in May 2025.

Which messaging app did Russian brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov launch in 2013?

Telegram came from the brothers behind the social network VK, built so Russia's security agencies could not read messages; Pavel was dismissed from VK and left Russia in 2014.

WeChat, China's 'app for everything', is developed by which company?

Tencent launched WeChat in 2011 as a chat app; its digital 'red envelopes' of Lunar New Year cash, added in 2014, pulled users into its payment service, a rival to Alibaba's Alipay.

Which chat app, launched in 2010, counted more than 90 percent of South Korea's population as users in 2022?

KakaoTalk is so central to South Korean life that when a data-centre fire knocked it out in October 2022, the company's co-chief executive resigned within days.

Which South Korean search giant's Japanese arm created the messaging app Line in 2011?

NHN Japan, the Japanese subsidiary of South Korea's Naver, built Line after the March 2011 earthquake disrupted phone networks; it launched that June.

Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former engineer at which company?

Cisco had bought Webex, where Eric Yuan led engineering; in 2011 he pitched a smartphone-friendly video system, and when his bosses turned it down he left to found Zoom.

Signal is developed by what kind of organisation?

A nonprofit foundation has run Signal since 2018, when WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton put in $50 million; the app is free, its code is public and it relies on donations.

Crazy Frog, marketed by ringtone seller Jamba!, had a hit covering which film theme?

'Axel F', Harold Faltermeyer's theme from Beverly Hills Cop, gave Crazy Frog a UK number one in 2005, outselling Coldplay's comeback single 'Speed of Sound' by more than 113,000 copies.

The Crazy Frog sound was created by Daniel Malmedahl imitating what?

Daniel Malmedahl recorded himself imitating a two-stroke moped engine in 1997; Erik Wernquist animated the character, first called The Annoying Thing, in 2003.

Lady Gaga originally wrote 'Telephone' for which artist, who recorded a demo?

Gaga wrote 'Telephone' for Britney Spears, who recorded a demo for her 2008 album Circus but did not use it; Beyoncé featured on the 2010 single instead.

'Call Me Maybe' by Carly Rae Jepsen was originally written in what genre?

Jepsen and Tavish Crowe wrote 'Call Me Maybe' as a folk song; producer Josh Ramsay of Marianas Trench reworked it into the 2011 pop hit.

Drake's 'Hotline Bling' appeared as a bonus track on which 2016 album?

Views arrived in April 2016, nine months after 'Hotline Bling' came out, and carries the 2015 hit as a bonus track; by then Drake had spoofed his own video in a phone-company advert at Super Bowl 50.

In the 2002 thriller Phone Booth, who plays the publicist trapped by a sniper's call?

Colin Farrell plays publicist Stu Shepard, pinned in the booth by Kiefer Sutherland's unseen sniper; the release was held back from late 2002 to April 2003 after the real Washington sniper attacks.

In 2004's Cellular, a kidnapped teacher randomly phones a young man played by whom?

Chris Evans plays Ryan, the young man whose mobile becomes the kidnapped teacher's lifeline; the story came from Phone Booth writer Larry Cohen and was remade in Hong Kong as Connected in 2008.

Which Bell Labs scientist shared the 1978 physics Nobel for detecting the cosmic microwave background?

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson first blamed the hiss in their Bell Labs horn antenna on pigeon droppings and scrubbed it clean; the noise stayed, and proved to be the afterglow of the Big Bang.

The 'lovers' phone' and other early mechanical telephones transmitted speech through what?

Mechanical acoustic telephones carried speech as vibrations along a taut string or through speaking pipes, centuries before electric telephones.

Which 1970s detective series began every episode with a caller leaving a message on an answering machine?

The Rockford Files opened with the camera tracking across a messy desk to Jim Rockford's answering machine, which played a new caller's message each week, almost never tied to the plot.

Which term describes passing an ongoing mobile call from one cell tower to the next?

Handover, called handoff in American usage, keeps a call alive between cells; the American engineer Amos Joel patented the method in 1972, opening the way for the mobile phone business.

Which 1989 comedy used a phone booth as a time machine?

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was written with a 1969 Chevy van carrying its heroes through history; the phone booth replaced it so the film would not echo the DeLorean of Back to the Future.

The quarter-inch jack plug on studio headphones was invented in the late 1800s for use on what?

Telephone switchboards used the plug so operators could connect callers by hand; shrunk to 3.5 mm in the 1950s for portable earphones, the design became the everyday headphone jack.

What is 'roaming' in mobile telephony?

Roaming means using a phone outside its native network, typically abroad; the EU abolished the extra charges between member states in June 2017, a policy it calls 'roam like at home'.

Which 2007 Nokia flagship slid one way to reveal a keypad and the other way to reveal media keys?

The N95 reached shops months before the first iPhone and already had GPS, a 5-megapixel camera and fast 3G data; Nokia billed it as a 'multimedia computer' rather than a phone.

Nokia's 5110 of 1998 introduced Xpress-on, which let owners swap what?

Snap-on coloured covers came in seven colours at launch, and Nokia's adverts promised a phone to match any outfit; swappable fascias soon became a standard feature and a business of their own.

Al Gross patented the first telephone pager system in 1949 for use by which profession?

Physicians were Gross's intended users, but those he met at a 1949 medical convention feared a pager would upset patients or interrupt their golf; a New York hospital adopted it the next year.

What knocked out tens of millions of US pagers in May 1998?

Satellite failure was the cause: Galaxy IV's onboard computers failed and it spun out of position, cutting off pagers nationwide along with pay-at-the-pump petrol stations and broadcast television feeds.

In 1951 the first customer-dialled long-distance call went from Englewood, New Jersey, to a mayor in which state?

California's Alameda took the call: Englewood's mayor dialled ten digits and reached Mayor Frank Osborne in 18 seconds with no operator, the first public use of an area code.

'Nomophobia', a word coined in Britain in 2008, is the fear of being without what?

A working mobile phone is what nomophobes dread losing: the word shortens 'no-mobile-phone phobia' and comes from a 2008 survey for the UK's Post Office in which about half of users admitted the worry.

In which country did the first known written use of the word 'selfie' appear, in a 2002 forum post?

The poster, writing in Australia, described a drunken fall at a 21st birthday; Oxford Dictionaries made 'selfie' its 2013 word of the year and tied it to Australians' fondness for '-ie' words such as barbie.

The first phone book, a cardboard sheet listing 50 names in New Haven, left out which of these?

Phone numbers did not yet exist, so callers asked the operator for people by name; a Lowell doctor proposed numbering in 1879, fearing measles would lay low the operators who knew everyone.

Which country gave households free Minitel terminals in the 1980s to replace the printed phone directory?

France reckoned that giving away Minitel terminals would save on printing phone books; at its peak some 25 million people used it to book trains, bank and chat, and it stayed in service for three decades.

'Phubbing', snubbing someone for your phone, was coined in 2012 for which Australian reference work?

Ad agency McCann coined 'phubbing' in 2012 for the Macquarie Dictionary, gathering lexicographers and poets at the University of Sydney, then spread it through the Stop Phubbing campaign.

Blue light from a phone screen at bedtime delays sleep by suppressing which hormone made by the pineal gland?

Melatonin normally rises as the sun sets, so a bright screen tricks the body clock into acting as if it were still daytime.

Arsonists in Britain torched mobile phone masts over a false rumour tying them to which disease?

COVID-19 was falsely blamed on new mobile networks, and one of the masts set alight was serving an emergency Nightingale hospital in Birmingham.

Mobile phone signals travel on which band of the electromagnetic spectrum, the one also used by Wi-Fi and radar?

Microwaves travel by line of sight and, unlike longer radio waves, do not bend around hills or follow the curve of the Earth.

What does the US National Cancer Institute call the only consistently recognised bodily effect of a phone's radio waves?

Mild tissue heating around the ear is all that has been shown, and it is too slight to raise the body's core temperature measurably.

A mobile phone's transmitter throttles back to as little as one milliwatt in which situation?

Close to a cell tower the network orders the handset down to the lowest power that still gives a clear signal, so a phone works hardest where reception is poor.

The US Food and Drug Administration suggests holding a phone to the opposite ear from which implanted device?

Pacemaker wearers are advised to keep the handset on the far side of the body, because radio energy can interfere with some medical electronics.

Mobile phone signals belong, like visible light, to which class of radiation, unlike X-rays and gamma rays?

Non-ionising waves lack the energy to knock electrons off atoms, the property that lets X-rays and gamma rays damage DNA directly.

Which measure, quoted in watts per kilogram, shows how much radio energy from a phone ends up in the user's body?

Specific absorption rate is averaged over a tiny sample of the body: a single gram under American rules, ten grams under the international standard.

Which US agency sets the exposure limit of 1.6 watts per kilogram that every mobile phone sold in America must meet?

The FCC, better known for policing the airwaves, shares oversight of handset safety with the Food and Drug Administration.

In 2011 the World Health Organization's cancer agency gave radio waves from mobile phones which hazard label?

Possibly carcinogenic is the agency's cautious Group 2B, a label for limited evidence that it also gives to aloe vera leaf extract.

Which US president, on retiring in 1961, reportedly had to be shown how to use a rotary dial telephone?

Dwight Eisenhower picked up his own household line after leaving office and needed an assistant to demonstrate the dial most Americans had long used.

On a standard rotary telephone, which digit sends the longest burst of pulses down the line, ten in all?

Zero has the longest journey back to rest, clicking the line open ten times, while 1 needs just a single click.

Which letter, along with Z, was left out of the three-letter groups on the classic North American rotary dial?

Q was skipped so that the 7 hole read P, R, S, while Z, when it appeared at all, was tucked into the final hole on its own.

Which sound, first used in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1908, tells a caller an automatic exchange is ready for a number?

Dial tone was devised by engineer August Kruckow to do a job once done by a human voice asking which line was wanted.

Which bandleader's 1940 swing hit took its title from the telephone number of Manhattan's Hotel Pennsylvania?

Glenn Miller's Pennsylvania 6-5000 was dialled PE 6-5000, with P and E found in the 7 and 3 holes of a rotary dial.

Whitehall 1212, dialled as WHI 1212 on rotary phones until the 1960s, was the famous number of which organisation?

Scotland Yard kept Whitehall 1212 for non-emergency calls until Britain moved to all-figure numbers in the 1960s.

Which country's rotary dials ran in reverse, so that its emergency number 111 sent the same pulses as Britain's 999?

New Zealand's dials counted down where British ones counted up, so a 1 there sent nine pulses and 111 reached the switchgear exactly as 999 did in Britain.

The first commercial automatic telephone exchange opened in 1892 at La Porte, a town in which US state?

Indiana's La Porte subscribers tapped out numbers on keys beside the telephone, because the finger-wheel dial was not patented until 1896.

What pushed the Bell System's leaders in 1919 to drop their long resistance to dial telephones and automatic switching?

Strikes by switchboard staff showed how exposed a hand-connected network was, and the company began buying automatic equipment that same year.

Which speed-regulating device, also found in wind-up record players, keeps a rotary dial spinning back at a steady rate?

Centrifugal governor weights hold the returning dial to roughly ten pulses a second, the pace the switching machinery was built to follow.

Mobile phones are widely reported to carry around ten times more bacteria than which regularly cleaned bathroom fixture?

Toilet seat surfaces get scrubbed because people link bathrooms with germs, while handsets are handled all day and rarely cleaned at all.

A 2011 British study for Global Handwashing Day found which gut bacterium on one in six mobile phones tested?

E. coli of faecal origin turned up on 16 per cent of handsets, even though 95 per cent of their owners said they washed their hands with soap.

Apple's cleaning guide says an iPhone may be gently wiped with a 70 percent solution of which disinfectant?

Isopropyl alcohol wipes are approved, but Apple rules out bleach and peroxide products and says to keep moisture away from every opening.

In a phone's IP68 rating the 8 covers water, while the 6 grades protection against what?

Dust and other solid particles are graded by the first digit, and a 6, the highest mark, means the casing is completely dust-tight.

Which author imagined a world wiped out by a plague from a dirty telephone after banishing its telephone sanitisers?

Douglas Adams packed Golgafrincham's supposedly useless citizens, telephone sanitisers included, onto an ark in his second Hitchhiker's Guide novel.

In a 2014 study, about 82 percent of the dominant bacteria on smartphones were also found on which part of their owners?

Fingers passed on so faithful a copy of each person's bacteria that the researchers suggested phones could act as sensors of the personal microbiome.

Which fingerprint-resisting screen coating, on Apple handsets since the iPhone 3GS, is worn away by harsh cleaners?

Oleophobic coatings make the grease left by a user's touch bead up so it wipes off without smearing, and they thin naturally with ordinary use.

An antimicrobial smartphone screen material shown by Corning in 2014 fights bacteria with ions of which metal?

Silver in ionic form was built into the surface of Corning's Gorilla brand and demonstrated at that year's CES trade show.

A 2020 review of 56 studies named which cause of skin infections among the most numerous bacteria on mobile phones?

Staphylococcus aureus appeared in more than one study in three, on handsets from hospitals and from the wider community alike.

Which term, from the Latin for tinder, describes an object such as a phone that carries infection between people?

Fomite goes back to a 1546 essay on contagion by the Renaissance scholar Girolamo Fracastoro, who meant clothes and wooden objects that kept disease alive.

The emperor of which country was an influential visitor to Bell's telephone exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exposition?

Brazil's Pedro II had opened the fair beside President Grant, the two of them starting the giant steam engine that powered its machinery hall.

Bell and his backers offered to sell the telephone patent outright for $100,000 to which company, without success?

Western Union passed on the patent, and in one unverified telling its president waved the telephone away as nothing more than a toy.

Before women took the job, the earliest telephone exchanges were staffed by which group, soon dropped for bad behaviour?

Teenage boys' attitude on the line was judged unacceptable, which opened the job to the women who soon became the voice of the telephone.

The Moscow–Washington hotline of 1963, pictured in films as a red telephone, in fact began with which equipment?

Teleprinters carried typed messages between the Pentagon and the Kremlin, a link made urgent by the Cuban Missile Crisis; fax machines took over in 1986.

Callers in Lowell, Massachusetts, stopped asking for subscribers by name in 1879 amid fears of which disease?

Measles threatened all four of the town's operators at once, and giving each of the 200-plus subscribers a number let stand-ins be trained quickly.

By some accounts, an 1860s German telephone was tested with a nonsense sentence saying that a horse does not eat what?

Cucumber salad featured in a German phrase sent over a device its self-taught inventor called the Telephon, built years before Bell's patent.

Which European capital had Telefon Hírmondó, a 'telephone newspaper' piping news to subscribers' homes from 1893?

Budapest's service was the first telephone newspaper and the longest lived, still relaying radio programmes down the line until 1944.

Granules of which element, squeezed by sound waves in the mouthpiece, carried voices in telephones until the 1980s?

Carbon granules pack closer under pressure and pass more current, turning the voice's vibrations into a matching electrical signal.

The first 911 call in the United States was placed in 1968 in Haleyville, a small city in which state?

Alabama got there first because a small independent phone company raced to beat AT&T, and the speaker of the state's House made the call.

Which newspaper employs the DC Comics reporter who sometimes changes into his superhero costume in a telephone booth?

Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent is Superman's cover identity, though in the earliest stories his paper was called the Daily Star.

Which band's 2012 hit 'Payphone', featuring rapper Wiz Khalifa, was the world's fifth best-selling single that year?

Maroon 5 sold 9.5 million copies of the single, which frontman Adam Levine co-wrote with a team that included producer Benny Blanco.

In which Alfred Hitchcock film does Tippi Hedren's heroine take refuge in a telephone booth during an attack?

The Birds left Hedren with real cuts to her face when a pane of the booth's glass shattered on her during filming of the scene.

British communities can buy a disused red phone box, often to house a tiny library or a defibrillator, for how much?

£1 is the price, and more than 6,000 kiosks have been converted into book exchanges, defibrillator points and other local uses.

Which English city, whose council long ran its own telephone network, is known for cream-coloured telephone boxes?

Hull's kiosks were put up by the city corporation instead of the Post Office, so they were painted cream and never carried a crown.

The 1959 student craze of phonebooth stuffing produced a world record of 25 people at a YMCA in which country?

South Africa's Durban students crammed at least most of their bodies into one upright kiosk, yet the fad was judged passé by the end of that year.

Visitors to the 'wind phone', an unconnected telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Japan, pick up the receiver to do what?

Speak to dead loved ones: a garden designer set it up to keep talking to a cousin who had died of cancer, placing a disconnected rotary telephone inside.

American slang for informing on someone to the authorities comes from dropping which coin into a payphone?

A dime paid for the tip-off call that gave the phrase its meaning; Bell payphones of the era also took nickels and quarters.

A lone telephone booth miles from any building won online fame in 1997 after being spotted on a map of which desert?

Mojave cinder miners had asked for the booth in 1948, and once its number spread online strangers rang it and even camped beside it to answer.

The world's first public telephone kiosk, the Fernsprechkiosk, opened in January 1881 on Potsdamer Platz in which city?

Berlin's kiosk opened eight years before an American inventor first fitted a public telephone with a coin mechanism.

Britain's K6 red telephone kiosk of 1935, nicknamed the Jubilee kiosk, marked 25 years on the throne for which king?

George V's jubilee gave the K6 its nickname, and it became the first red kiosk to be used widely outside the capital.