History

The first mobile phone is usually credited to Martin Cooper (an engineer at Motorola). On April 3, 1973, Martin made the first mobile call using a DynaTAC 8000x to Joel Engel, his rival at Bell Labs.

The Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage was known as the brick phone because it weighed 2.5 lbs.

• It took 10 hours to charge and offered about 30 minute conversations

• In 1989, Motorola released the MicroTAC, which was a smaller version

• QWERTY keyboards also became a thing, which pretty much killed pagers

We didn't see phone sizes change until the mid-to-late 90's with StarTAC, the first flip phone with SMS (Short Message Service), but sizing advancements wouldn't have been possible without a similar evolution in battery design. In 1991, we saw a change from NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) batteries to Li-ION (Lithium Ion).

By 1992, the first touchscreen was released with the IBM Simon and by 1998 we saw color with the SIEMENS S10 for the first time in mobile. These two advancements were also important, because they eventually helped create the baseline for the a phone most people remember - the iPhone.

Today, in 2024, 97% of Americans own a mobile phone, which translates to roughly 325 million people.