<P> 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 . 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 . 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 . </P>
<P> 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 . 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 . 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 . </P>
when did cell phones first come on the market
when did cell phones first come on the market
In 1999 , the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones
In 1999 , the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones