The First Cell Phone

• The first mobile telephone call was made on April 3, 1973 by John F. Mitchell, President & COO and Martin Cooper, a former Motorola inventor who is known as “the father of the cellphone”. • The weight of the phone used to make that call was 4.4 pounds (2 kg). The brick–like battery required, which allowed a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to charge, made carting it around even more of a chore.

Evolution of mobile phones, through early smartphone – Wikipedia. The phone at the bottom is Motorola 8900X-2.

• A decade later in 1983 DynaTAC 8000x was the first mobile phone to go on sale in the US costing about $3,995 each.

• The first commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1979, followed in 1982 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

• On December 3rd 1992, a 22-year-old test engineer for Logica CMG typed out a very simple message using a personal computer, “Merry Christmas.” It flew over the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis, an executive at British telecom Vodafone, and since then, we just haven’t been able to stop texting.