when did push button phones come out in the uk
Push-button telephone In the UK, a brief excursion from standards, GPO telecoms introduced in 1968 their first push-button telephone, the GPO 726 (Ericsson N2000 series [22]), that used neither pulse dialing nor DTMF tones. It used a DC signalling system comprising a number of rectifier diodes[23] arranged in different polarity configuration according to the button pressed. The 726 also requires a ground wire as well as the usual A and B wires. The irony was that with the few installations, the dial signal still had to be converted to pulses in the host PABX. It is now a rare device.
Smartphone Smartphones were still rare outside of Japan until the introduction of the Danger Hiptop in 2002, which saw moderate success among U.S. consumers as the T-Mobile Sidekick. Later, in the mid-2000s, business users in the U.S. started to adopt devices based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and then BlackBerry smartphones from Research In Motion. American users popularized the term "CrackBerry" in 2006 due to the BlackBerry's addictive nature.[22] Outside of the U.S. and Japan, Nokia was seeing success with its Symbian-based smartphones, the business-oriented Eseries[23] and entertainment-focused Nseries.