On this day 45 years ago Martin Cooper an engineer from Motorola first person in history to make a handheld cellular phone call in public. Standing midst the hustling midtown Manhattan near a 900 MHz base station on Sixth Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets, Martin Cooper placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey on April 3rd, 1973 using a handset weighing approx 2kg. And the world was about to change forever.
Ten years later after further research the prototype used to make the first cellular phone call was developed into Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, world’s first commercial cell phone. Though considered as huge for today’s standards DynaTAC 8000x was truly the first mobile phone as it was easy to carry. Although it took one decade for the first mobile phone to reach to customers and two more decades to overthrow landline dependence, today mobile phones have arguably wiped out landlines from household. Mobile phones have evolved over the years from a symbol of luxury to necessity and lifeline of millions around the world. It plays a major role on our lives and effect the way we perform our everyday tasks. Most of these changes are apparent, while others so subtle that we wouldn’t even notice.
Mobile rapidly started taking over other devices in our daily lives like radio, calculator, watch, alarm and many more. Today an average mobile phone can take a better photograph than a normal DSLR camera or could browse internet faster than the broadband router that we install at our home. Other that with a normal smart phone one could watch live television, use it as a barcode reader, a digital wallet, locate and start a car, change channels in your television, take measurements, printouts or even as a Wifi hotspot. These tasks may seem simple now but who knew 45 years back a simple wireless phone call would have evolved so much to affect our lives in such a huge manner.
Today out of the 1.32 billion populations in India there are about 650 million mobile phone users and roughly 300 million smart phone users according to technology consultancy Counterpoint Research. With easier availability and extensive network coverage around the country, it won’t be a surprise to see the numbers surge to an unbelievable high in coming years.