when did cell phones first come on the market
Smartphone In 1999, the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones to achieve mass adoption within a country. These phones ran on i-mode, which provided data transmission speeds up to 9.6 kbit/s.[19] Unlike future generations of wireless services, NTT DoCoMo's i-mode used cHTML, a language which restricted some aspects of traditional HTML in favor of increasing data speed for the devices. Limited functionality, small screens and limited bandwidth allowed for phones to use the slower data speeds available.[20] The rise of i-mode helped NTT DoCoMo accumulate an estimated 40 million subscribers by the end of 2001. It was also ranked first in market capitalization in Japan and second globally. This power would later wane in the face of the rise of 3G and new phones with advanced wireless network capabilities.[21]