The cellphone turns 40 this month, and it has come a long way from the
enormous $3,995 brick that creator Martin Cooper first used walking along the
streets of New York City in 1973 to call Joel Engel, the head of research at
his rival company Bell Labs.
Let’s take a look back at the evolution of the omnipresent mobile phone.
1973 – The first cell phone
**
**
The phone Martin Cooper designed for Motorola weighed 2.5 pounds and had a
battery life of 20 minutes.
**1983 – Motorola DynaTAC 8000X
**
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was used by Gordon Gecko in the 1987 film Wall
Street and was nicknamed ‘The Brick,’ for obvious reasons. Given its huge
price tag (roughly $9,400 in 2013 dollars), it is not surprising that only
Wall Street Masters of the Universe like Gecko could afford it.
**1984 – The Nokia Mobira Talkman
**
The lunchbox-sized Nokia Mobira Talkman might have been a nightmare to carry
around, but it had longer battery life than the sturdy ‘Brick.’
**1995 – The Motorola
**
The first flip phone, the Motorola StarTAC (seen here in Clueless), was
becoming commonplace in the mid-’90s. Finally phones were approaching a
reasonable size.
**1996 – The Nokia 8110
**
The ‘banana’ phone, the Nokia 8110, was also Neo’s phone in The Matrix (1999)
- and was the first example of the sliding form factor.
**1998 – The Nokia 5110
**
Who didn’t play endless games of Snake on their Nokia 5110? A generation was
introduced to cellphones and texting with this little creation.
**2004 – Motorola Razr
**
The Motorola Razr was best known for being ultra-thin and for having a seven-
hour battery life.
**2007 – The iPhone
**
And then came the game changer – the Apple iPhone reshaped the mobile phone
industry.
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