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Mobile celebrates 40th anniversary(Flare (Pakistan) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The mobile phone turned 40 with no fanfare to mark the occasion in a market which seemed focused on new smartphones like the iPhone and a possible Facebookthemed device. The first mobile call was placed April 3, 1973, by Motorola engineer Martin Cooper, head of a team working on mobile communication technologies. Cooper made the call on Sixth Avenue in New York, before going into a press conference using a Motorola DynaTAC -- a device that weighed one kilogram, (2.2 pounds) and had a battery life of 20 minutes, according to Motorola. Cooper told last year that he placed the first call to a rival, Joel Engel of Bell Labs. "To this day, he resents what Motorola did in those days," Cooper said. "They thought that we were a gnat, an obstacle... we believed in competition and lots of players. And we also believed -- our religion was portables, because people are mobile. And here they were trying to make a car telephone and a monopoly on top of that. So that battle was the reason that we built that phone." Cooper and his team were honored earlier this year with the Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering for their work. In 40 years, the industry has come a long way. Research firm IDC predicts 900 million smartphones will be sold in 2013 -- along with roughly the same number of more basic feature phones. And the phone has become a key advertising platform -- eMarketer said US mobile advertising spending grew 178 percent last year to $4.11 billion, and spending is expected to rise a further 77.3 percent to $7.29 billion in 2013. Motorola described the device in a 1973 press release as “a handheld, completely portable telephone which will allow its user to receive telephone calls from virtually anywhere in a metro area equipped with the new DynaTAC system.” “This new DYNA TAC portable radio telephone will operate over radio frequencies and “talk” to any conventional telephone in the world,” it added, promising it would be as easy to use as an ordinary phone. Cooper, now aged 85, was general manager of Motorola’s Communication Systems Division and claimed he was inspired to create a mobile phone following the invention of the car telephone by AT&T in the 1960s. He is widely regarded as one of the fathers of mobile technology and his achievements have been recognised by the National Academy of Engineering, which awarded him the Charles Stark Draper Prize in February. The award is the academy’s highest honour and considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineering. Although he conceded that the cost of the first mobiles would be prohibitive to most, Motorola said that it expected that the price of handsets would come down over time and that it anticipated demand from diverse groups of people. Mobile technology has advanced significantly in the last four decades with devices becoming smaller, thinner and more advanced. More than half of the UK’s population own a smartphone, while the advent of 3G and 4G technology has encouraged the growth of the mobile internet – a development that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop says could impact more people than the Industrial Revolution did in the 19th century. “The mobile phone has completely transformed both our personal and professional lives,” said Trevor Connell, managing director at Siemens Enterprise Communication. “We’ve seen a raft of advances in telecommunication technologies in the last 40 years, with smartphones now able to send SMS, MMS, video and connect to the internet. The mobile phone industry is the fastest-growing in the world. The consumerisation of the mobile phone has not only changed the way we communicate, it has changed the way we work.” Moreover, while most know that Alexander Graham Bell can be credited with “inventing” the telephone, only a few can name the engineer responsible for the creation of the mobile phone. However, while Bell’s work is now the subject of debate over whether the Scottish-born inventor actually invented the telephone – as rival Elisha Gray may have in fact been working on, and had developed a similar device before Bell – few would argue that Martin Cooper can be credited with being the first to use a mobile phone to call a business associate. Cooper had reportedly conceived the idea for a mobile phone in the 1960s when rival AT&T invented the car phone. |