The shoulder phone was a shoulder-slung mobile telephone NTT began selling in 1985. NTT marketed it as the "Shoulder Phone," and the first model, the 100, weighed 3kg. It was a car phone that could also be used away from the vehicle - an extension of the car phone service Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation had launched in December 1979 - and its name came from the way the unit was carried on the shoulder like a bag. NTT itself describes it as "no more than an evolution of the car phone," yet it was the first device in Japan to make carrying a telephone on your person practical.
In the shoulder phone era, mobile telephony belonged to a small group of users. NTT recalls that mobile phones carried the image of a "status symbol for the wealthy" until the compact, lightweight mova became a hit in 1991. Handsets were lent to subscribers rather than sold: the purchase scheme for mobile and car phone handsets was not introduced until April 1994. Charges were steep as well, far beyond what an ordinary individual would sign up for casually.
Until then a telephone was equipment fixed to a building or a car; the shoulder phone created the idea of carrying one around. Two years after its launch, in 1987, NTT released the long-awaited handheld "TZ-802" (about 900g) and started mobile phone service you could "walk around with." That year, mobile phone subscriptions passed 100,000 for the first time. In 1988 the Shoulder Phone 101, a portable-only model (still carried on a shoulder strap) weighing 2.5kg, followed.
The company that later became NTT Docomo was established in 1991, and handsets shrank ever faster. i-mode connected phones to the internet in 1999, feature phones followed, and after the iPhone arrived in 2007 smartphones took the lead. The path from the 3kg shoulder phone to roughly 900g in two years, and on to devices that fit in one hand, has unfolded over the forty-odd years since 1985. See telephone evolution for the mobile phone timeline.