This article presents a compact multiband planar antenna designed for mobile phone applications.The antenna performance is achieved by designing a planar monopole antenna into distributed radiating elements. The proposed antenna is comprised of a chopped circular radiator appended with a meander line and an L‐strip coupled element, which is an extension of the ground plane. The combination of a chopped circular patch and L‐shaped coupling strip residing on the top side generates lower band while upper band resonances are attained separately by chopped circular resonator and meander line elements. The antenna shows a planar structure which occupies an area of 56 × 17.6 mm and can be directly printed onto a circuit board at low cost making it especially suitable for mobile phone applications. The manufactured antenna is experimentally verified and covers several wireless communication bands, such as LTE 750, GSM 850, GSM 900, DCS, UMTS‐2110, Bluetooth, WLAN, WiMAX, and UWB. The high frequency structure simulation is used to design and analyze the antenna performance, and a practical structure was fabricated and tested. The measured and simulated return loss show good agreement. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:589–593, 2013; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27360