30 years of connecting
Australian business to the future

1988-1991: The early years: when mobile phone meant car phone

Opening the shop was a bold move for the young George, who had come out of an apprenticeship installing car phones into luxury vehicles.

“In those days there was no such thing as a hand-held device, and the first mobile network was the 007, which is the equivalent of a zeroG.

“Car phones were called mobile phones, but they were actually wired into the vehicle.They were also big and bulky. Owners of luxury cars loved the idea of a car phone but then I would turn up with a transceiver weighing 25-30kg that had to be fitted to the vehicle and they were ‘you’re not putting that in my Porsche, Mercedes, Rolls Royce.”

1992: Nokia love affair begins

In 1992, a year after opening the shop, Nokia launched its first GSM phone and so began one of Australia’s greatest technology love affairs.

Nokia devices would go on to dominate the mobile phone landscape for the next 12 years until the arrival of the iPhone.

Those first couple of years with the shop were tough going. Still in his 20s, George and his wife, Helen, had welcomed son Stephen three years before they opened the doors. Two daughters, Samantha and Stephanie, followed. 

“It was tough, but I had to make it work.”

And work it did.

1995-1998: Flip phones and texting

“By the mid-90s, everyone wanted a phone. The devices themselves only had a standby time of 8 hours and about an hour of talk time, but people were walking in off the street with wads of cash and buying off the shelf. Of course, there was no eftpos or payWave then. We had some fun trying to verify cheques.”

The first flip phone, the Motorola StarTAC, featured in the movie Clueless (1995). Next came the first sliding phone in the Nokia 110, which starred as Neo’s phone in The Matrix (1999).

Mobile phones were starting to get smaller and more affordable. In 1998 Nokia bought out the 5110 with its Xpress-on covers. This set the scene for a global shift towards the mobile phone as a fashion accessory.

The Nokia 5110 was also the go-to phone for the arrival of text messaging that same year. For the sake of younger readers, texting was not quite what it is today as we punched out a sentence with a choice of three letters to a button, and no such thing as predictive text.

2002: Blackberry brings mobile email

Then in 2002, Blackberry released its first mobile phone – the first device to be aimed at business rather than consumers. 

 It offered something all its competitors couldn’t match – access to emails on the go – on its monochrome 160×160 screen.

It could push emails and handle web browsing (sort of) and had BBM – BlackBerry’s Instant Messenger service.

Blackberry launched no less than eight models in 2002-2003.

Suddenly mobile phones were all about business, and George was well-positioned to meet the corporate need.

2012: MobileCorp outgrows historic retail premises

In 2012, MobileCorp outgrew its original retail site and moved into its current premises in the Aero building in Mascot.

The old store is heritage-listed and remains on the books. It still has the original bank vault on the lower ground floor.

Over the years the company had gone through several name changes: from mlc mobile phones, to Mobile Connections, to Mobile Connections Corporate, and finally in 2012 to MobileCorp.

2017: The passing of the baton

In 2017, George Aravopoulos handed over the reins of MobileCorp to his son, Stephen. It was an easy decision.

“Stephen has been around the business his whole life. He knows it inside out. Times are different now and every business has to evolve. Stephen is leading MobileCorp into its next phase of growth.”