Mobile productivity has come a long way since the early concepts of 1946.  It’s amazing how we just started using the term ‘cellphone’ only to find out later on that it has become obsolete and is being replaced by something more sophisticated called ‘smartphones.’  And this phenomenon didn’t just happen with cellphones; there are oodles of devices that has become unfashionable because of the rise of the smartphone era. It has truly changed the world.

Tracing back the history of mobile productivity from 1946 to date, the concept was first used by the Swedish police to wirelessly connect to telephone networks.  The development of the device was slow till 1970 and it’s advancement pace has been incessant ever since. Dr. Martin Cooper, former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, invented the first portable handset, and was the first person to make a call on a cellular phone. The first commercial pager, the Motorola Pageboy, was released a year after, and then got its first public cellphone trial in 1977 with 2000 customers in Chicago.

Marking the commercial debut of cellphones was the release of DynaTAC 8000X from Motorola in 1983. During the 90s, pagers have become widely used. Players in the arena were only Apple, IBM, Nokia and Palm OS. The first commercially available camera phone was released in 2000 from Sony Ericsson, the Sharp K-SH04, boasting a 0.1 megapixel resolution and the first to offer a color display. RIM entered the competition in 2002 releasing the first Blackberry, the 5810, running Palm OS. In 2005, the first phone to integrate iTunes was released, the Motorola ROKR E1.

Apple’s reign on the smartphone arena loomed in 2007 when it unleashed the first iPhone, assimilating the power of a mobile phone, an internet communicator and an mp3 player into a single device, paving the way to a new breed of “smart” devices.  And in 2008 the iPhone 3G and the App Store came out, as well as the first Android device and the Android Market.  The ingress of the two giants harbingered the decline of Palm OS and Nokia, which used to be the industry’s strongholds.

2010 marks the beginning of intense competition, which continues today.  The iPhone 4 and Windows Phone 7 rolled out, while Android’s smartphone market share increased from 5 percent to 29 percent. This year, Apple announced its 15 billionth download from the App Store, with iOS users purchasing 61 percent more apps this year than 2010. Meanwhile, Android surpassed iPhone in terms of the mobile browsing market share for the year. Android powers 36.3 percent of mobile devices today, while Apple takes 34.4 percent of the market. However, Apple is a single manufacturer while Android runs across a number of mobile companies. Along with tablets, smartphones marks the post-PC era.

It is expected that there will be more than 6 billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2011. 26 percent of all phones worldwide are smartphones. According to 59 percent of business owners, CEOs and presidents, wireless services are indispensable for business.

Since mobile devices are so intertwined with our lives that we inadvertently mix them in corporate environment, a study conducted by Citrix reveals that the ‘Bring Your Own Computer’ policy is going to go mainstream really soon. About 92 percent of IT organizations are aware of their workers using a personal device in the work place. It’s expected that by 2013, 94 percent of survey respondents will have a formal BYO policy, up from only 44 percent today.