When you look back at the history of the television set, its evolution has been on a steady trajectory.

Once they were small, black and white and carried the weight of a small car. In fact, they felt as though the people you saw on your screen were actually stuffed in the set itself, such was their mass.

Over time they kept growing, colour arrived and they swapped those extra pounds for a more anorexic approach. Today, the most modern are so slim it’s hard to understand how they fit the technology in them to actually operate.

Mobile phones, on the other hand, have had a rather more rollercoaster approach as the years have passed.

Firstly, it should be said, when mobiles first emerged I can quite clearly remember thinking they’d not catch on. Who, I thought to myself, wants to be accessible to the world 24/7? I also, just to undermine any faith you may have misguidedly had of my technology judgements, thought the same about iPads (just big iPhones, what’s the point? said I). Oops.

But back to phones. When I was handed my first – it came with my job as a young reporter back in the mid-1990s – it was a brick of a thing (an Ericsson NH97, Google has informed me). You had to push a plastic antenna up in the vain hope of getting any reception and all it did was make or take calls. No messages and certainly no browsing headlines on an app. We didn’t even know what an app was. The internet, for that matter, was still an agonisingly slow, poorly populated place.

Such was its bulk, putting it in your pocket was simply not possible – well, not unless you were wearing the baggy trousers and generous pockets of U Can’t Touch This-era MC Hammer. And, frankly, few did. On reflection, I’m not even sure they had pockets. But I digress.

Not long after, as phones started to be adopted by the masses, the entry point to the technology became ludicrously cheap.

You could suddenly buy cut-price mobiles in supermarkets for little more than a tenner. All of which were on pay-as-you-go tariffs. They were certainly a better size. But they still challenged the pocket.

All of which meant we all bought those little straps which allowed you to attach them to your belt. We all thought it looked really cool. We were, of course, dreadfully wrong.

With the market now flooded, many opted to upgrade to monthly contracts and more sophisticated devices…especially if it meant they fitted in a pocket.

The size of phones started to shrink. The smaller the handset the better seemed to be the trend. Foldable or simply tiny for use with one of those dreadful Bluetooth headsets, size mattered.

But suddenly technology – fuelled by the potential of a mobile internet connection – accelerated and it turned the short-lived trend on its head.

I joined the network Three shortly after it launched and got possibly the ugliest phone I’ve ever owned. It was big and definitely not pocket-sized. But it promised to deliver Premier League video clips to my phone so, as the sucker I was, I thought I’d get it. I’m pretty sure it offered ludicrously priced video calls too. But, of course, no one else had one so it was a tad pointless.

For the most part, watching a clip required considerable patience as the reception was (generally) poor and the buffering was worse.

By the time the iPhone arrived a few years later – this just a little over ten years since my first brick-like contraption – the landscape was forever changed.

Such was the model’s popularity, they’ve even offered larger sized ones (the ‘Plus’ range) so you could properly enjoy the crystal clear screen they came with.

Who says size isn’t everything?

Well, Samsung apparently. It’s currently heavily advertising its latest Flip device – returning your mobile to comfortably fit in your pocket and with room to spare.

Given my track record, I confidently predict a return to those dreadful belt holders by the end of the decade. You heard it here first.