From the brick to pay-as-you-go

They started as a rich man's toy the size of a breeze block. Now everybody has one, and they could, in theory, just about fit into a wristwatch. The mobile telephone has come a long way in 16 years.

1985: Britain gave out its first mobile telephone licences to Racal Vodafone and Cellnet, which simultaneously launched services using Tacs (total access control system) - ultimately derived from the two-way radios first used in Detroit in 1921 in the battle against Prohibition mobsters. Telephone of the year was the Nokia Mobira Talkman, thought so fast, light and manoeuvrable that it was advertised by Nigel Mansell.

The Talkman weighed 4.8kg. (about 10lb 9oz) and cost £3,000. Battery life was less than a day between charges. It gave one hour of call time.

1987: saw the true beginning of the yuppie boom and the 700g Ericsson Hotline and 800g Mobira Cityman. The network couldn't cope with demand.

1988: the Government sanctioned new frequencies on a new system - Etacs (extended total access control system).

Typical of the new breed of handset was the Motorola 8800 - the stereotypical builders' phone - and the NEC 9A, which weighed 800g (1lb 12oz).

1990: by now there were almost 800,000 users. "It was fabulous growth," recalls Simon Rockman of What Mobile magazine.

1991: the first acknowledged attempt to introduce the new standard GSM that today embraces 700 million phones around the world. The early GSM handsets like the Orbitel 900 looked like the transportable phones of five years before. 1992 was the beginning of the end of the image of the mobile as the rich man's toy, with the launch of the new consumer tariffs and the NEC P4 phone - the first phone which you could forget was in your pocket, at 56 x 153mm, slim at 21mm and exceptionally light at only 225g. It also had a talktime of 60 minutes and a standby time of a full day.

Using a phone for five minutes a day in 1993 would have cost you more than £1,000 over the year compared with less than £300 now. Even so, for the first time, mobile telephones went mass market.

The new users were targeted with the first "sexy fashion phones". Swatch had an abortive attempt to produce a phone. More desirable was the Sony which earned the nickname "Mars bar", - considered tiny and even at a price of £299 there was a long waiting list.

Competition became ferocious with the launch of UK Mercury and One 2 One services in September 1993, the phones for them the Motorola M300 and Siemens M200 at £299 and £249 respectively. What really stood out was the cost of using them - free phone calls in the evening and weekends, for instance. Tariffs dropped left right and centre. GSM was getting better and the Nokia 2110 made to take advantage of it was probably the most significant mobile phone ever made. At 237g it measured 148 x 56 x 23mm. It had a big screen which showed the strength of signal and remaining battery and had a 100-name and number memory.

1994: launch of Orange. While most of the networks didn't support the advanced features of GSM, Orange did - text messages, for instance, and billing by the second. This was also the year of the first "smallest ever phone, they won't get any smaller than this" - the Sony CMR-111, down to 64 x 85 x 24mm and 185g - so small the microphone was on the end of a flip down boom to let the microphone reach the mouth.

1996: the Motorola StarTac at 93 x 52 x 20mm caused a sensation. It too flipped open, this time with the screen inside. The new lithium ion battery brought size and weight down. It weighed 91g and cost an astonishing list price of £995, although black-market prices went above £1,400, making it worth a lot more than its weight in gold.

Today: there are several phones competing for the "lightest" tag. The Trium Cosmo, at 69g, and the Sensei sptd88 and Sendo D800 - both at 68g. All these cost about £100 with a contract. Looking back, the first mobiles weighed 70 times as much and cost 30 times as much.

Dedicated, single purpose telephone handsets have now probably reached their smallest size - although there is no accounting for the taste for novelty, especially in Japan, where talking to your wristwatch may yet be thought the coolest thing on earth, even if you can't hear the answers. For the first time designers are "building air" into the phones, designing them to be bigger than the components require just so they are comfortable to hold. Instead, phones will do more and the batteries last longer. They will also, almost certainly, be incorporated into other devices to produce an all-in-one, all-purpose gadget far beyond the mere "it's good to talk" slogan - satellite navigation, personal organiser and "electronic secretary", full internet access and email.

2003: the new third generation technology phones will be bigger and heavier again, and battery life and signal quality will probably be worse.