Forty years ago today, Martin Cooper, a VP at Motorola made history by making the very first cell phone call.
During it’s 40 years of existence the cell phone as morphed from a chunky, plastic giant to a slender, sleek and thin gadget that doubles as a computer and a camera.
The DynaTac 8000X was one of the first cell phone’s to hit the market and went on sale in 1984 for almost $4,000. The phone had an LED display and took 10 hours to charge.
Then came the MicroTac, the first flip phone in 1989. When it was released it was described as “about as thick as a fat wallet and the earpiece while tapering down to half the thickness of a deck of cards at the mouthpiece.”
While there were many versions of the cell phone following these two releases, the first camera phones arrived in 2000 which paved the way for the smartphone which first went on sale in 2002.
Of course, the most popular smartphone of them all, the iPhone was released for the first time in 2007, “an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator, are you getting it?” said Steve Jobs on it’s release date. “These are not separate devices, this is one device and we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is.”
Just forty years after the first cell phones hit the stores we have taken the bulky chunky cell phone and turned it into one of the most revolutionary and fashionable products on the market. If all that can change in just 40 years, imagine where the future of the cell phone lies.