The Weight of Cell Phones, Twenty Years Later: Lighter, Then Heavy Again

The common belief is that cell phones have always gotten lighter, year after year, up to today. The archive's data tells a different, more interesting story: a V. The median weight drops for a decade, bottoms out in the mid-2000s, and then climbs back up — and not by a little.

The diet years: 1995-2007

The Peso con batteria field is filled in for 89% of the archive (4,761 records out of 5,336) and is clean: 99% of the values are a pure number in grams, with no guesswork needed. Removing the 900 records with a category flag other than "cellulare" (PDAs, navigators, cordless phones — the same rule already used for the articles on Italian brands and on launch price: otherwise you'd end up weighing a PDA too), the median weight year by year is:

• 1995: 215 g
• 1999: 135 g
• 2003: 86 g — the minimum of the entire archive
• 2007: 88 g

In eight years the median cell phone loses 60% of its weight. A representative model of these lighter years is the Siemens MC60 from 2003: exactly 86 grams, that year's median.

The return of heavyweights: 2008-2013

From 2008 the curve reverses, and it climbs without stopping:

• 2008: 93 g
• 2010: 99 g
• 2011: 110 g
• 2012: 122 g
• 2013: 132 g

From the 2007 bottom to 2013, the median weight climbs back up by more than 50%. The cause isn't in our database, but it's a well-known historical fact: these are the years when the touchscreen replaces the keypad and the smartphone replaces the feature phone — bigger screens and larger-capacity batteries inevitably weigh more. A model from these years, close to the 2013 median, is the Samsung Galaxy S4: 132 grams, the same number as that year's median.

The records: a 403-gram brick, mini-phones at 45

The heaviest cell phone in the archive, excluding PDAs and tablets, is the ZTE V9 from 2011: 403 grams, more than many of today's smartphones — and it's a real phone, not a cataloging error (it has 3G, a camera, and Bluetooth).

At the opposite extreme, the surprise doesn't come from the diet years but from afterward: the absolute lightest phones are almost all from 2011-2012, little-known brands made specifically to fit in a cigarette pack — the Niu Bingo N103 (45 g), the Icemobile Rock Mini (46 g), the Blu Swing (47 g), the Plum One (50 g). It's not even a new idea: in 2005, right in the middle of the "diet" era, the VK Mobile VK2000 already weighed 48 grams — lighter than its own year's median (92 g) and nearly as light as the mini-phones from six years later. These are exceptions, not the general picture: the median of their respective years (92 g in 2005, 110-122 g in 2011-2012) tells quite a different story.

How we measured (and what's left out)

• Valorized base verified year by year, not just the overall percentage: coverage ranges between 67% (2013, the archive's last years) and 100%, never a sudden collapse that would have made the trend an artifact — the same check already carried out, and failed, for the never-published article on interchangeable covers.
• Category flags excluded (PDAs, navigators, cordless phones, dongles, fax machines, tablets, in-vehicle devices): 900 records out of 4,761, otherwise the weight of a PDA would end up mixed in with that of a cell phone.
• 60 values discarded because they mix up the unit of measurement (a "430 mAh" battery value ending up in the weight field) or are a placeholder ("n.d.", "n.c."): 1.3% of the total, with no effect on the medians reported.
• Two records cataloged as cell phones but that aren't (the BlackBerry PlayBook and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9, both genuine tablets with the "Tablet" flag incorrectly set to "no" in the original data) were manually excluded from the cited examples, but not from the median calculation — which, being a median and not an average, wouldn't be shifted by two rows out of hundreds anyway.
• Every number above was calculated twice with two independent extraction methods (one that averages when the field contains a range like "67/78 grams", one that takes only the first number found): the medians match exactly, year by year.

Interested in another transformation told year by year through our data? Try The Year the Camera Became Normal.