UK Museum celebrates 40 years of 'Going Mobile', features over 70 iconic models

The year was 1990 and we were new parents, nervously leaving our 13-week-old son for the first time with his aunt while we went to see Simply Red in concert. We were anxious about being out of contact for several hours. And mobile phones? Well, they were around but almost nobody had one.

The national newspaper I was working on at the time had two of the early “brick phones” that the newsdesk guarded like gold bars and handed out grudgingly to reporters on remote jobs. 

So for that night I “borrowed” one so we could be called in case of an emergency. Which, of course, never occurred. 

Fast forward 34 years, days before the latest iPhone launch tomorrow, and that baby is now 6ft 3ins with a beard, and we all have a state-of-the art mobile device in our pockets with which we run most of our lives and can’t bear to be parted from. 

And now I’m almost at the end of the British Isles, next to the stunning cove at Porthcurno in Cornwall, holding a brick phone like the one I took 30 years ago, at an exhibition of mobile phones on show for the first time.

It’s the Motorola 8000X, sold in the UK from 1985, which was the first widely available hand-held mobile phone. It was a true icon of the 1980s, made famous by yuppies and Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street. When it was first launched in the States it cost the equivalent of £10,000. Any existing models are highly collectible.

As I hold it, there is a stir from some of the children visiting PK Porthcurno: Museum of Global Communications, who are wide-eyed to discover how mobiles used to look. The phone is part of Going Mobile, an exhibition in partnership with the Mobile Phone Museum, sponsored by Vodafone. It explores the mobile’s amazing journey, from exclusive status symbol used mainly for voice calls, to today’s powerful mini-computer in everyone’s pockets.

Ben Wood, 52, founder and CEO of the Mobile Phone Museum, said: “We have an extensive and detailed online collection of 3,000 unique models of mobile phones. But we jumped at the chance to use some space here so thousands of people can see some of them in real life.”

Some of the most iconic, ground-breaking, and, yes, downright weird, have been chosen for display until next April. The period spans the 40th anniversary of the first mobile call in Britain, made as Big Ben rung in the New Year from 1984 to 1985.

Among the wacky is a Japanese model dubbed the “Toilet Seat” because, well, that’s what it looks like. Or the ground-breaking taco-shaped Nokia 7700 that cost millions to develop in 2003 but never went on sale, mainly because users had to use a stylus on the screen and talk into the side of the device. Or how about the KDDI Infobar with interchangeable buttons that looked like a chocolate bar and was only ever sold in Japan.

The exhibition also reveals a series of firsts in mobile development. There’s the first smartphone the IBM Simon, an ugly device that was years ahead of its time in 1994.

Only 50,000 were made and are now worth serious money. There’s also one of the first TV phones, the oddly-shaped Virgin Media Lobster launched in 2006 with a TV campaign featuring Pamela Anderson.

Then there’s the first-ever flip phone (Motorola MicroTAC 9800X, 1989), first MP3 phone (Samsung, 2000) the first camera phone (Sharp, 2000) and of course the first ever iPhone (2007) the Steve Jobs model that changed mobiles forever.

Technology analyist Ben started collecting mobiles in the 1990s while working for Vodafone, where he saw old models being binned.

He said: “I realised this was a pivotal piece of technology and an important part of social history, so I got permission to take them home. As with anyone who becomes a collector, people kept offering me more. Dozens became hundreds, then thousands, until in 2018 we put things on an official footing and set up a charity and launched the Mobile Phone Museum.”

In 2021, Vodafone began a five-year sponsorship of the museum to safeguard key devices and inspire future engineers and designers.