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Half a century of mobile phones

I recall my first mobile phone.

It was the 1980s and it was a Motorola beige brick that was in no way "pocket-friendly".

All it did was allow you to make and receive phone calls, at a ludicriously high price for the monthly plan and the per-minute rate.

There was no fancy screen either, just a simple red LED display and a rubbery keypad.

The old-school nickle cadmium batteries made up at least half the weight of the device and would only deliver about 10 hours of continuous operation -- unless you were actually taking or making calls -- in which case we're talking mere minutes of runtime.

Then there was the issue of coverage.

Back in those days the landscape wasn't littered with cell-towers like it is today so there were many, many areas where service was unavailable.

Despite these drawbacks, it was incredibly novel to have a phone on your person that you could take anywhere and (at least some of the time) answer and make calls from/to almost anyone you knew.

Telecom was my first service-provider and this was a totally analog system so there were no SMS messages or other fancy features.

Then BellSouth came along and introduced digital mobiles using GSM.

My oh my, did the world change then?

To be honest, I figured that SMS was perhaps less than useless... since so few other people I knew had a compatible handset and you couldn't SMS the wife on the home-phone to tell her you'd be late home.

However, the digital phones were *tiny* compared to the old beige bricks and the voice quality was usually much better than analog -- although when it was bad it was really bad. The best thing however, was that you could finally put your cellphone in your jacket pocket without looking as if you'd developed a nasty tumor.

Leap ahead to today and things have changed even more.

Unlike that first Motorola mobile, today's sleek smartphones are all screen and voice-calls are the least impressive feature they offer. Now we're toting about what, back in the 1980s, would have been considered mainframe-like processing power and storage and the bandwidth to do amazing stuff such as conduct video-calls or stream HD movies.

I fondly recall that in my teenage years, the "trendy kids" would wander around with a transistor radio glued to their ears so they could listen to the latest songs on the local commercial station. These days they have ear-buds and a smartphone in their pocket which gives them immediate access to almost every track ever commercially released, plus a whole bunch of non-commercial indie stuff as well.

Apparently this week is the 50th birthday of the mobile phone and it's gobsmacking to see just how far this humble device has come in half a century.

Of course, being a very early adopter and innovator, I have to confess that I did have a mobile phone in my car back in the early 1970s -- long before such things were commercially available in this part of the world. I rigged up a radio transmitter/receiver in my car and a matching unit at home, wired into the phone network. It would amaze my friends when I called them and said "I'm driving to your place, be there in a minute"... then turned into their driveway.

Since the system was built using old valve-based radio-telephones that I acquired as scrap it was far from practical though. Not only was it operating on illegal frequencies but the equipment would flatten your car battery in just a few minutes if used without the engine runnning.

As if to emphasize just how far we've come, the Telco formerly known as Vodafone has announced that it's struck a deal with Starlink to use its satellite service in the few remote areas where there's no terestrial coverage.

One can only wonder what will happen in the next 50 years of smartphone development.

I'm pretty sure we'll see oodles of AI thrown into the mix so that your phone may actually become your best friend rather than just a useful bit of tech. It will learn to anticipate your needs so as to deliver information before you even request it. Odds are that it will also handle a fair degree of your communications automatically, without you having to waste time answering calls and messages from your less important acquaintances.

Any predictions from the floor?

Carpe Diem folks!

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