When "Futurama" debuted in 1999, smartphones weren't yet ubiquitous. There were some computer-like phones on the market, of course — tech-savvy nerds might recall Ibm's Simon from 1994 — but the first wireless internet-ready phones weren't put on the mass market until 2001. The first iPhone wasn't introduced until 2007, and by then, "Futurama" had already been canceled for the first time. As such, when one sees the 31st-century characters on "Futurama" using cell phones, they are extrapolated from the cellular technologies of the present. It wouldn't be until the 2011 "Attack of the Killer App" that modern iPhone technology would be addressed on "Futurama," and the showrunners depicted a world where eyePhones were implanted directly into the users' eyeballs.

During the writing of the episode "Amazon Women in the Mood", the most popular cell phone on the market was the Nokia 3310. Some people may have also still had their old Motorola StarTACs, released in 1996. Cell...