It’s 2002, and you’re blitzing pixelized alien ships on Space Impact on the cramped, 2.4-inch screen of the Nokia 3310 your mom got you for your fifth birthday. Flash forward to today, and you’re defeating the same alien overlords, but with near-realistic graphics and sound effects on your 5.8-inch iPhone X.
The crisp and near-edgeless screens of this generation’s smartphones are a far cry from the monochrome and boxy displays of the early 90s and 2000s. And even those old phones were a leap from the screenless bricks people had to lug around in the 70s and 80s.
But how exactly did these displays get so advanced, so quickly? Take a look at the innovative strides that phone manufacturers everywhere made to create the crystal clear screens of today.
The 80s: Keeping it Straightforward
One of the first cellphones that had a screen was the Motorola DynaTac 8000X, which was released commercially in 1984. If you thought the iPhone Xs Max was pricey (around $1,449 for the 512GB version), your jaw would probably drop at the DynaTac 8000X’s retail price: a whopping $3,995. It measured over 13 x 1.75 x 3.5 inches and weighed over 28 ounces. For all its height and girth, it only had a tiny strip of a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screen near the speaker to let users see what number they’re typing. But hey, all innovation had to start somewhere. And you could easily call your friend from, let’s say, Salt Lake City wherever you are in the country, which was a pretty big deal in the ’80s. Motorola surely delivered on providing the best of the best when it came to portable telephones at the time.
The 90s: The Rise of Nokia and Touchscreens
Motorola continued to take a commanding lead when it came to cellphones until it saw its first real competition in the ’90s. Its rival was Nokia, a Finnish electronics company that would later take the world by storm. Nokia came out with the 1011 cellphone in November 1992.
It featured two lines of monochrome LCD that could each take eight characters. The phone could store up to 99 phone numbers and could show SMS texts. At this point, you can definitely see the improvements in the software and hardware involved to create the graphics on the 1011’s screen. It showed clear letters and even signal and battery indicators.
The 90s also saw the rise of Personal Digital Assistants like the Apple Newton and the IBM Simon, which both featured touchscreens that can be activated with a stylus. The Simon was considered to be the world’s first smartphone.
It had a 4.5-inch black and white LCD, which was pretty huge at the time. The phone had the standard calling and texting features. It even gave users a choice to install third-party apps using huge cards you can slot at the bottom of the device. While PDAs were considered as dinosaurs during the 2000s, there’s no doubt that it paved the way for its smart device descendants.
The 2000s: Seeing in Color
The phone screens of the 2000s saw an upgrade in the form of a rainbow. The first mobile phone that featured a colored display was actually the Siemens S10, which launched in 1997. However, the rest of the 90s and early 2000s didn’t really follow up to its four-color combination (blue, green, red, and white) until the legendary Motorola Razr V3.
Sporting a 2.2-inch Thin-Film Transistor (TFT) LCD screen and 176×220 pixel resolution, the Razr V3 was the epitome of cool. It even had 3G connectivity, and its vivid screen allowed for a 0.3-megapixel camera that featured video recording. The rapid advancement continued to the late 2000s with the Nokia N-series, which all featured vibrant colored screens, third-party apps and games, and sharper cameras. And in 2007, the first iPhone was born.
2010 Onwards: Touch and Go
The first iPhone was revolutionary because it was one of the few phones that featured a touch screen that was easily navigated by hand. It had a 3.5-inch TFT capacitive touch screen with over 16 million colors and 320×480 resolution. The phone was also jam-packed with applications with its app store and had a cutting-edge camera. While the screen was made to be resistant from scratches and falls with its Corning Gorilla Glass coating it didn’t stop users from getting their phones fixed because they wrecked the displays.
This small touch screen phone popularized the smartphone. Pretty soon, manufacturers like Samsung caught up, releasing their Galaxy S Android phones. Its latest release, the S10 features a near bezel-less 6.1-inch Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) display (for the base model). LEDs are much more energy efficient, produce shaper details, and produce more accurate colors than LCD screens. It’s like having a mini-monitor or high-end TV in the palm of your hands!
Though phone screens have definitely evolved dramatically since the single LCD strip that the DynaTac 8000x had, engineers and researchers everywhere don’t plan on stopping any time soon. Now, manufacturers like Xiaomi are developing in-display cameras that allow phones to be almost 100% screen without compromising the ever-popular selfie. With display technology advancing at a rapid pace, the future definitely looks bright and colorful.
