The First Cell Phone Call - Then and Now

It wasn’t that long ago- 38 years to be exact- when Motorola’s Martin Cooper made the world’s first cell phone call. "As I walked down the street while talking on the phone," Cooper once told an interviewer "sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call." Fast forward 38 years and the world changed dramatically with this invention. As he so aptly stated "people want to talk to other people -- not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire."

From a physical perspective, that first cell phone was so big that it was often described as resembling a shoe or a brick and weighed 2½ pounds. Cooper said "the battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn't really a big problem because you couldn't hold that phone up for that long."

Today, of course, we see devices that are totally different. Our cellphones today are even smarter than the computers that put men on the moon. We have smartphones that are not only stereo- quality entertainment systems but also ‘Dick Tracy’ smart at knowing where you are and what’s around you at any point in time. You can watch TV and movies on them, play games on them, and –oh, I almost forgot- you can still use it to actually phone someone.

Who would have thought back then that we would have such a proliferation of devices that the market confuses us more than simplifies. We have Windows 7 phones with tens of hundreds of apps, Blackberries with thousands of apps, and Androids and iPhones with hundreds of thousands of apps. We have devices that run on Java, IOS, C and C++, QNX and Symbian. We have smartphones pretending to be tablets and tablets trying to be smartphones. It’s very confusing out there and that’s precisely why we created our company hereiammobile- to simplify things. I believe the winners will be the companies that can deliver some sanity in all this mess and deliver smart, well thought-out services to simplify business when you’re mobile.

It’s rather interesting with the proliferation of all of these devices and applications that in 2006, Cooper founded GreatCall, a U.S. mobile virtual wireless operator (in cooperation with the Verizon network). The company provides mobile telephone service carried on its own brand of handsets, which are marketed specifically to those looking for simplicity. What a simple idea.