How the telephone lost its cord

First mobile call

On April 3^rd 1973 Motorola manager Martin Cooper made a phone call with Joel Engel, head of the cellular program at AT&T. Cooper stood on Sixth Avenue in New York with a cellphone prototype from Motorola. Via the first cell the call was transferred into the fixed line network which effectively demonstrated the new technique. On 21^st September 1983 Motorola's first cellphone named DynaTAC 8000X (see photo on the right) received admission from FCC and started to be sold. In spite of its 800g weight, its size of 33x4,5x9cm, the low battery life of under one hour and its hefty prize of initially $3,995 it was bought more than 300.000 times during the first year.

Like many inventions this had also a military history. Like Nokia also Motorola produced walkie-talkies for the army and later on for the police. At Motorola this success story started with the Handie-Talkie, a radiotelephone for the parachutist in World War II. Later on it was enhanced for police radio.

Martin Cooper noted later that Motorola recognized the deficits of the car phones early and they heard from the police that they had a desire for a mobile device. “People did not want to be chained to the walls, or stuck in their cars or homes; they liked to move around. We built radios and pagers and saw how they became everyday objects the smaller they became. That's how you build a religion, a business religion and the essence of that religion is that no thing can be too small or too light.”

Handover

A lot more complicated was the research on how a phone can move from cell to cell. Motorola adopted the 1946 patented idea of a radio cell from Bell Labs and developed the handover where the cellphone is passed to the next cell when the reception level permits this. In 1977 the first mobile network was established between Washington D.C. and Baltimore but only in 1978 the FCC reserved the needed frequency bands for cellular communication. With the admission of the first cellphone, the DynaTAC 8000X, the success began in 1983. “The people accepted it at once. They had seen it on Star Trek and other science fiction movies. While other science was hard to understand the people saw the benefit immediately.”, Don Linder, responsible for the sale of the DynaTAC remembers.

Marketing

From the very beginning Motorola used a dual strategy in its marketing: One campaign targeted business men which are traveling a lot and suffer from expensive telephone bills in hotels while the other campaign targeted housewives which want to stay in touch with their families and friends while shopping. Motorola benefited from its experience selling fixed line phones: They started as business devices but only became a mass market in the US when they addressed the communication needs of housewives.

Standardizing

Another step while developing cellular communication was the early work standardizing the technique which began as early as 1982. Only with the GSM standard the mass market could develop, also in Germany. In this country GSM based cellular networks started in 1992, 19 years after the first call. The first cellular phone from Motorola which still looked a lot like the DynaTAC 8000X was the Motorola International 3200.

Milestones

Year	Picture	Brand	Model	Wireless Standards	Characteristics
1973		Motorola	DynaTAC Prototyp	proprietary	First experimental cellphone
1983		Motorola	DynaTAC 8000X	AMPS	First commercially available cellphone
1992		Motorola	International 3200	GSM 900	First GSM cellphone
1992		Nokia	1011	GSM 900	First Nokia GSM cellphone
1994		e-plus	PT-11	GSM 1800	First GSM 1800 cellphone
1994		IBM	Simon	AMPS	First Smartphone and first cellphone with touchscreen
1995		Siemens	S3	GSM 900	First cellphone with SMS
1996		Nokia	9000 Communicator	GSM 900	First Nokia smartphone
1997		Motorola	StarTAC 85	GSM 900	First GSM clamshell and first cellphone with vibrating alert
1997		Siemens	S10	GSM 900	First cellphone with 4-color-display
1997		Motorola	8900	GSM 900/1800	First GSM dualband cellphone with manual switch between GSM 900 and 1800
1998		Motorola	6150	GSM 900/1800	First GSM dualband cellphone with automatic switch between GSM 900 and 1800
1999		Siemens	S25	GSM 900/1800	First cellphone with graphic display
1999		Nokia	7110	GSM 900/1800	First cellphone with WAP
1999		Toshiba	Camesse Petit	PDC	First cellphone with camera
2001		Ericsson	T39m	GSM 900/1800/1900	First cellphone with Bluetooth
2001		Ericsson	T68m	GSM 900/1800/1900	First cellphone with 256-color-display
2001		Nokia	8310	GSM 900/1800	First cellphone with FM radio
2002		Nokia	7650	GSM 900/1800	First cellphone with integrated VGA camera
2002		SonyEricsson	T68i	GSM 900/1800/1900	First cellphone with MMS
2003		Sharp	GX10	GSM 900/1800	First cellphone with 65.000-color-display
2003		SonyEricsson	P800	GSM 900/1800/1900	First cellphone with color touchscreen
2003		Motorola	A830	UMTS GSM 900/1800/1900	First UMTS cellphone
2004		SonyEricsson	Z1010	GSM 900/1800	First cellphone with front camera
2006		LG	KG920	GSM 900/1800/1900	First cellphone with 5 megapixel camera
2007		Apple	iPhone	GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First smartphone with finger operated Multitouch-screen
2008		Apple	iPhone 3G	UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First iPhone with UMTS
2008		HTC	Dream	UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First Android smartphone
2010		Nokia	N8	UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First smartphone with 12 megapixel camera
2010		Nokia	808 Pureview	UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First smartphone with 41 megapixel camera
2010		HTC	Velocity 4G Pureview	LTE UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First LTE smartphone
2010		Vivo	X20 Plus UD	LTE UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First Smartphone with in-display fingerprint sensor
2012		Nokia	Lumia 920	LTE UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First smartphone with Qi
2018		Motorola	MOTO Z3	5G LTE UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First 5G smartphone (by use of add-on module)
2019		Meizu	Zero	LTE UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First smartphone without keys & connections
2023		Apple	iPhone 15 iPhone 15 Plus iPhone 15 Pro iPhone 15 Pro Max	5G LTE UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First smartphones with Qi2
2024		HMD	Skyline	5G LTE UMTS GSM 850/900/1800/1900	First Android smartphone with Qi2

Overview

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