the_tyrant
04-03-13, 09:26 PM
Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made telecommunications history when he placed the first cellphone call 40 years ago. And who did he call, you ask? His rivals at Bell Labs, of course. Oh snap!
Still, it took another decade for the mobile phone to reach the masses, because Motorola didn’t make the DynaTAC available until March 1983. And in an example of just how quaint the tech business was back then, Motorola had a press event 10 years before the phone was on sale.
Which brings us to April 3, 1973, when the company that eventually brought us the Razr and Droid introduced the mobile phone. Forty years later, we’re still dropping calls like bad habits and struggling to get a signal inside a supermarket. Not that it matters, because we rarely use our phones to make phone calls. Instead, they’re a gateway to our digital lives, a means of doing everything from sending texts to updating our status to posting photos and listening to music.
Thousands of phones have come and gone, and most of them seem to run on Android. But the number of handsets that could be called truly groundbreaking is surprisingly small. Here they are.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve probably missed your favorite. And you’ll probably tell us about it in a comment typed on your phone.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/04/influential-cellphones/
What was your favorite phone of all time? I always liked the Nokia n-series, and the Palm Pre line. Too bad both of them are gone now (Although you can say that the Pureview 808 is the spiritual successor to the N-series)
Still, it took another decade for the mobile phone to reach the masses, because Motorola didn’t make the DynaTAC available until March 1983. And in an example of just how quaint the tech business was back then, Motorola had a press event 10 years before the phone was on sale.
Which brings us to April 3, 1973, when the company that eventually brought us the Razr and Droid introduced the mobile phone. Forty years later, we’re still dropping calls like bad habits and struggling to get a signal inside a supermarket. Not that it matters, because we rarely use our phones to make phone calls. Instead, they’re a gateway to our digital lives, a means of doing everything from sending texts to updating our status to posting photos and listening to music.
Thousands of phones have come and gone, and most of them seem to run on Android. But the number of handsets that could be called truly groundbreaking is surprisingly small. Here they are.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve probably missed your favorite. And you’ll probably tell us about it in a comment typed on your phone.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/04/influential-cellphones/
What was your favorite phone of all time? I always liked the Nokia n-series, and the Palm Pre line. Too bad both of them are gone now (Although you can say that the Pureview 808 is the spiritual successor to the N-series)