The history of mobile phones covers mobile communication devices that connect wirelessly to the public switched telephone network.

While the transmission of speech by signal has a long history, the first devices that were wireless, mobile, and also capable of connecting to the standard telephone network are much more recent. The first such devices were barely portable compared to today's compact hand-held devices, and their use was clumsy.

Drastic changes have taken place in both the networking of wireless communication and the prevalence of its use, with smartphones becoming common globally and a growing proportion of Internet access now done via mobile broadband.

In 1908, Professor Albert Jahn and the Oakland Transcontinental Aerial Telephone and Power Company claimed to have developed a wireless telephone. They were then later accused of fraud in a case which was ultimately dismissed; nevertheless, no phones ended up being manufactured. In 1917, the Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt successfully filed a patent for a "pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone". Beginning in 1918, the German railroad system tested wireless telephony on military trains between Berlin and Zossen. In 1924, public trials started with telephone connection on trains between Berlin and Hamburg. In 1925, the company Zugtelephonie AG was founded to supply train-telephony equipment and, in 1926, telephone service in trains of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the German mail service on the route between Hamburg and Berlin was approved and offered to first-class travelers.

Fiction anticipated the development of real-world mobile telephones. In 1906, the English caricaturist Lewis Baumer published a cartoon in Punch entitled "Forecasts for 1907" in which he showed a man and a woman in London's Hyde Park each separately engaged in gambling and dating on wireless-telegraphy equipment. Cartoonist W. K. Haselden published The Pocket Telephone: When Will It Ring? in 1919, depicting six awkward possibilities. In 1923, Ilya Ehrenburg casually listed "pocket telephones" among the achievements of contemporary technology in a story in his collection Thirteen Pipes (Russian: Тринадцать трубок). In 1926, the artist Karl Arnold drew a visionary cartoon about the use of mobile phones in the street, in the picture "wireless telephony", published in the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus. The popular American cartoon detective Dick Tracy acquired a two-way, atomic-battery-powered wrist radio in 1946, upgraded to a wrist TV in 1964.

The Second World War (1939-1945) saw the military use of radio-telephony links. Hand-held radio transceivers have been available since the 1940s. Mobile telephones for automobiles became available from some telephone companies in the 1940s. Early devices were bulky, consumed large amounts of power, and the network supported only a few simultaneous conversations. (Modern cellular networks allow automatic and pervasive use of mobile phones for voice- and data communication.)

In the United States, engineers from Bell Labs began work on a system to allow mobile users to place and receive telephone calls from automobiles, leading to the inauguration of mobile service on 17 June 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri. Shortly after, AT&T offered Mobile Telephone Service. A wide range of mostly incompatible mobile telephone services offered limited coverage areas and only a few available channels in urban areas. As calls were transmitted as unencrypted analog signals, anyone with radio equipment that could receive those frequencies could eavesdrop. The commercial introduction (in Japan in 1979) of cellular technology, which allowed re-use of frequencies many times in small adjacent areas covered by relatively low-powered transmitters, made widespread adoption of mobile telephones economically feasible.

In the USSR, Leonid Kupriyanovich, an engineer from Moscow, developed and presented a number of experimental pocket-sized communications radios in 1957–1961. The weight of one model, presented in 1961, was only 70 g and could fit in a palm. However, in the USSR the decision at first to develop the system of the automobile "Altai" phone was made.