Past Mobile Phones Version 1

Mobile phones at present are practically a necessity in life. However, in the past, mobiles were very different to what is around now!
Motorola was the company that first created a mobile phone. This all took place in the 1940’s. Even though the first mobile phone was created at that time, it was only on the 17th June 1946 that the first call from a mobile was made! Amazing!

The name of the first ever mobile phone was known as the ‘DynaTAC 8000X’. Its monster name reflected well upon its looks and style. This mobile, was finally released in 1983 and weighed a whopping 785g which is (28ounces). This heavy mobile phone sized up at 300x44x89mm. The mobile phone needed up to eight hours of standby time and would only allow one hour of talk time. To add to all this, it had an aerial protruding from the top of it at the length of 150mm. Despite its monster looks and short amount of talk time, this being the first mobile phone ever cost a huge amount of $3995. Only the rich could afford this amazing new gadget at the time! However, even with very limited signal coverage, there were a vast amount of 300,000 people using this mobile phone worldwide by 1984.

The geniuses that invented the first mobile phones which are much cherished gadgets of today are ‘Dr Martin Cooper’. (Thanks Cooper!) It was he who is considered the inventor of the first portable handset. Martin Cooper was a Project Manager at Motorola. He set up a base station in New York with the first working prototype of a cellular telephone. After various accounts of initial testing in Washington, he took the new mobile phone technology and showed it to the public.

It was in America that the first ever mobile phone was invented. The American public were lucky enough to have this new gadget of technology upon their land. It was not too long after when a cellular system opened up in Finland, Sweden and Norway which allowed the citizens of those countries access to the first ever mobile phone. By 1986, Iceland had also joined making this the largest network of cellular mobile phones at the time. After a lot of hard work and excitement about the new technology of a mobile phone, it was not long before the gadget became worldwide.

However, having this brilliant new mobile phone out on the market meant that there must have been some sort of technology behind it. How did it work? What happened when a call was being made? What was the transmission of the call? Well, mobile phones were all connected to a network by a central radio transmitter and receiver. When a call was made from a mobile phone cells were broken down into cities or areas. The cells would then rearrange, resulting in several frequencies being reused throughout the system. When the frequencies switched from one cell to the next, the transmission of the voice would take place from one phone to the other. It sounds complicated, but it was just how the mobile phone was created to work!

One person who was once a busy business member was interviewed about the many mobile phones that he had from the past. He has given some interesting details and spoken to us about the different features that his first mobile phone had and how they have developed. When talking about his first mobile, he explained that its only features included a dialling screen and a phonebook storage that was very limited. When changing his mobile phone, his newer model had a glass screen with ink in it that displayed the numbers that were being dialled. It also had a phonebook and bigger network coverage. More mobile networks were granted licenses and he said that he went from a Motorola mobile to a Voderphone network in 1986. He then said that in 1994, he managed to get another mobile phone that had the feature of SMS messaging. That was the new craze at the time on new mobile phones . After that, he said that mobile started to become an essential and more features started to appear and become part of mobiles . Email, cameras, infrared, Bluetooth, games and many more features were then added to mobile phones of today!