We all know that a cell phone isn’t really just a phone anymore (c’mon, you’ve seen the Sprint commercial I’m sure). It takes our pictures, sends and receives our emails, plays our MP3s and it even keeps track of our hectic lives with advanced calendar functions.

Yes, a cell phone isn’t just a phone.  But before there was this all-encompassing smartphone, we turned to other gadgets to take our pictures, send our emails, play our music and keep track of our personal calendars.

What were these gadgets?  Gadget Lab recently reported the five devices“killed” by today’s cell phone.  After an explosion of responses, the blog shot off even more gadgets replaced by the cell phone.

So here are all 12 of the replaced gadgets. Have they moved on to that better place?  Check your closet.  I’m sure you’ll find some of them collecting dust in there.

1. PDA- When you have your contacts, addresses, numbers and calendars all in one place, why get a PDA to hold the exact same data?
2. Camera- Cameras on phones are becoming more and more advanced.  Have you seen a picture taken with the iPhone? Remarkable.  The best part?  You always have it on you.
3. Landline- Although the big operators will still pressure you into purchasing a phone line with your cable and Internet package, don’t give in.  If you’ve got a cell phone and a decent minutes plan, there is really no dire need for a landline.
4. Web Browser- Why wait to surf the ‘Net from your computer when most phones today come equipped with a browser, giving you anytime, anywhere access to all the information on the World Wide Web.
5. Instant Messenger- First came SMS text messaging allowing one person to send a short message from his phone to another cell phone.  Many of today’s mobile phones not only offer SMS text messaging and its multimedia cousin MMS for messages with photos and videos, but also come equipped with applications for popular instant messaging services.
6. MP3 Player- With all of your music in one place, it’s more of a hassle now to lug around an MP3 player.
7. Pager- With of course the exception to the medical field, no one can remember the last time they heard someone say “page me!”
8. Wristwatch- You’ve got your time right on the front of your phone, why would you need it on your wrist as well?  Plus, if you have an even more advanced mobile you most likely have an alarm clock and timer, too.
9. Pocket Calculator- The usage of these have become practically obsolete thanks to calculators coming standard on every cell phone.
10. Satellite Navigation- Google Maps, anyone?
11. Books – ’m still not completely sold on this one, but it would appear as though a massive number of cell phone users are reading from their mobile instead of the old fashioned dead-tree.
12. Handheld Game Consoles- With all the games you can play on your phone now, what’s the point in spending more cash for yet another device to lug around?

And if you’ve ever wondered what happed to a lot of these gadgets you can be sure they have a home here at MuMoh.

Twenty-five years ago on October 13, 1983, the first commercial cellular call was placed to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell in Germany from the president of Ameritech Mobile Communications at a ceremony held outside of Soldier Field in Chicago.

Weighing nearly two pounds and 13 inches long, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X used on that historic day only had a mere 30 minutes of talk time.

A “two-pound phone with 30 minutes of talk time” sounds improbable what with today’s Lilliputian offerings and if we didn’t actually own some of the earlier incarnations of cell phones I wouldn’t believe it either. Some phones in our museum are so heavy and clunky they make our arms ache if we carry them too long.

So what else has changed in the last 25 years in cell phone technology besides smaller phones with more power? CTIA has released some interesting facts on just how different the technology has changed. In fact, it’s changing so quickly that we can usually spot the age of a photograph not by a person’s hairdo or clothes they are wearing but by the cell phone they are holding.

Here are some compelling stats from CTIA on how far we have changed since 1983:

• Today, there are more than 262.7 million wireless subscribers— 83 percent of the total U.S. population. That equates to 2,869 times more subscribers today than in January 1985.
• During the last 21 years, wireless subscribers’ average local monthly bill has decreased by nearly 50%.  What started as a nearly $100 monthly bill in 1987 averaged just $48.54 in June 2008.
• In 1985, the first year CTIA surveyed the wireless industry, wireless revenues amounted to less than $500 million dollars. Now, wireless service revenues have reached $143.7 billion in the last 12 months, with wireless subscribership reaching 262.7 million on June 30, 2008.
• Wireless data revenues – from games and music to text and photo messaging, mobile TV and web-browsing — in the U.S. now amount to more than 20% of all wireless service revenues. Just a mere five years ago, wireless data revenues amounted to only 2 percent of total service revenues. How many articles were even written about mobile applications a couple of years ago? We’re guessing not too many.

What kind of cell phone did you have five years ago? Ten years ago? Fifteen years ago? We were digging through the desk drawers at home recently looking for spare change and came across a cell phone from 2000. It looked like it was from another universe. But in 2000, it was top of the line and did a great job. Great as in it made phone calls. In public. And not from home.

Where will cell phone technology be in another 25 years? Share your ideas and memories with us! We’d love to hear from you.

Ask people familiar with telecommunications history and they’ll tell you that the first text message sent from a mobile phone was sent in 1993. But MuMoH has a phone that sent text messages more than 75 years before that!

The Kellogg Switchboard Supply Company field phone, model 1917 (and we’ve also seen model EE 3) provided American soldiers in WWI a portable telephone and telegraph communications in a single box. Cased in wood and carried by a leather shoulder strap, the battery powered phone could be carried into trenches or to base camps to provide communications. The phone also has a hand crank generator called a magneto for an additional power source.

US infantry soldiers would deploy a twisted pair of wires from one location to another. After the wires were connected to a field phone on each end, information about enemy strength and location of enemy forces, ranging information for artillery and other communications were possible. Telegraph codes could be sent as far as 20 miles away, and voice communications would travel a somewhat shorter distance. Soon battlefields across Europe were strewn with wires.

References:

• www.museumofcommunications.org
• www.telcomhistory.org/index.shtml
• www.landships.freeservers.com/new_pages/ewarfare_in_ww1.htm

It’s a device we keep in our pocket or handbag and take everywhere we go: the mobile phone. But not too long ago putting a cell phone in our pocket or purse was impossible.

MuMoH has a collection of 1980s and 1990s era mobile phones, and we’ll have information up about them soon. In the meantime, enjoy these vintage commercials when the cell phone was brand new:

Circa 1989:

Circa 1990:

Also known as “the brick,” Motorola’s Lazer was first introduced on the market in 1984. Weighing a whopping two pounds, priced at almost $4,000 with a half-hour talk limit before needing charging, it was an instant hit.

The Motorola phone has roots tracing back to the early 1970s. At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission was giving AT&T the green light to build a network to provide wireless service in local markets. AT&T was also considering its own wireless phone.

More than a decade and millions of dollars later, the analog phone was released in 1983 and stayed in the market until the mid 1990s, shrinking in size until it was recast as the Motorola Razr in the early 2000s.

An interesting 80s retro sidenote: Shops in China are hacking old versions and selling them with new color LCD screen and component. The LCD is only 4096 colors. All the menu works but the shortcut buttons is at the bottom part of the keypad, instead of under the LCD screen.

The MuMoH physical collection includes a later 1980s model, no serial number.

References:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7432915/
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/cellphones/retro-brick-cellphone-modern-gsm-guts-inside-237967.php

“Okay, you guys… [ cell phone rings; he pulls out a tiny cell phone ] Hold on. Hello? Yes. Really. Splendid. [ hangs up ] We’re going to the Dolce & Gabbana show. How fast can you have your bags packed for Milan?”

As the boss at Jeffrey’s, Will Ferrell (making his third MoPR blog appearance) demonstrated for America the marriage of fashion and mobility technology. In February 2001, with his super-mini cell phone, Ferrell helped us understand that the glitterati wanted technology compact and gilded; a sort of functional jewelry.

By Fall of that year, the boss at Jeffrey’s was placing a call on a phone not unlike the 1973 model held up in this picture of Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone. “Big is the new small,” Ferrell’s character informs us, after he hangs up from his call with Cami Diaz.

Mobile phones, (aka cell phones and portable phones), began to flourish in the 1980s. But research and development into mobile phones dates back to the 1920s.

Built long before the transistor, imagine the size of the wooden box filled with vacuum tubes used to house the first mobile “phone” (like the one shown in this 1924 picture). Likewise, imagine the size of the batteries used to power it. Walking around with such a phone was not only impractical, it was impossible. So the first mobile communications devices were built into vehicles, primarily for military and public safety use. They also worked on radio frequencies (VHF) and were never part of any phone system.

The technology concepts for true cellular networks were not conceived until the 1940s (see MoPR Mobility Minute: US Patent 2,292,387). With transistors replacing vacuum tubes and better networks becoming available, cellular car phones were introduced – once again battery size keeping true mobile communicators out of the pockets of the glitterati.

By the 1970s mobile phones were portable enough to be carried around like a briefcase. By the mid 1970s, at last a phone that can fit in the palm of one’s hand. Martin Cooper, a former general manager for Motorola, is widely considered to be inventor of the cell phone. Placing the first call over a portable phone — to his rival Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Laboratories, where he began his conversation by saying “Hello Joel, guess where I’m calling from?” — Cooper not only invented the mobile phone, but also the phrase most widely used by people with new mobile phones.

With the cost of cell phones and cell phone calls making adoption prohibitive for most people, many calls were made for only two reasons: first, the person being called had to guess where the caller was calling from; second, the caller had to inform the person being called that a second call would be placed once the caller got to a landline.

By the 1990s the cost of phones and calls were making mobile phones attractive to the general population. Today many cell phones, now able to fit easily into the palm of the hand, a small purse or even the pocket of tight-fitting jeans, come free with an annual service plan, and lower per minute rates and prepaid plans make it possible for a much wider swath of the world’s population to enjoy getting their friends to guess where they are calling from.

Now state legislatures are taking up anti-cell phone regulation to keep people from talking while driving and cell phone etiquette guides would become widely available, and widely ignored.

Text messaging allows people from all over the world to send short instant messages from phone to phone and helps people learn to type with their thumbs using only 10 keys. Amazing.

As adoption increases so do features. Sharp Electronics of Japan put a camera into phones in the early 2000s, and now camera phones are included on a very wide variety of cell phones, including those given for free with annual subscription plans. Suddenly people all over the earth were taking pictures of themselves with camera phones to send people visual clues to help guess where they were calling from.

Ringtones helped personalize phones by allowing a ring to sound like your favorite song or to have different rings for different people. For example, when my wife calls my phone plays “Don’t You Love Her Madly,” by the Doors. When I call, the “Darth Vader Theme” rings over hers.

By 2006, with low-cost phones and plans making it possible for Americas teenagers to have their own camera-equipped cell phones, text messaging became a disruptive nuisance in the classroom. Fortunately, the mosquito ringtone was invented, which produced an obnoxious sound like the buzz of mosquitos that adults cannot hear but are audible to obnoxious teenagers. Now these teenagers can text one another in class without disrupting the lecture with rings or buzzes from vibrating handsets.

Okay fine, you kids go and play with your phones and send text messages about how lame the grown-ups are. But in the end, we’ll have the last laugh. Grown-ups are taking over MySpace (subject of a future post).

By the way, our much-beloved Will Ferrell wasn’t the first comic genius to teach us about the marriage of fashion and mobility technology. 35 years before Jeffrey’s opened its SNL doors, Agent Maxwell Smart was placing calls from a shoe.

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations

Three names are associated with Walkie Talkies. Alfred J. Gross (1918 – 2000), Donald Hings (1907 – 2004) and Paul Galvin (1895 – 1959). But it appears that Canadian-born/American-raised inventor Alfred Gross built the first portable radio device in 1938 (Canadian Hings built his portable radio for the Canadian military in 1942). Gross, who has a number of US patents for mobile radio technology, once demonstrated his invention to a secret classified meeting of the FCC in 1944. The demonstration inspired FCC Commissioner E. K. Jett to write an article, “Phone Me By Air,” published in the Saturday Evening Post in July, 1945:

“Now, for good or evil, comes the Walkie-Talkie for civilians. Just radio, ‘Bring home an extra lamb chop,’ or, ‘I want to report a strange man’ – You can keep quiet, if you wish – but you probably won’t.”

The era of mass mobile communications predicted by Jett was still decades away, however.Paul Galvin’s company, The Galvin Manufacturing Company (later renamed Motorola), mass produced the Walkie Talkie for the US Military in the lead up to and during World War II.

The journeyman Walkie Talkie was the SCR-300 made by Galvin’s company, which delivered nearly 50,000 for Allied Forces in both the European and Pacific war theaters. When we think about Walkie Talkies today, we think about small handheld devices. But in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Walkie Talkie equipment was fitted into backpacks and weighed approximately 35 pounds.

By 1942 the first handheld radios — or Handy-Talkies — were deployed.

Communications devices were becoming more portable. But these devices used radio frequencies in the same way radio stations do. A broadcast of signals from the transmitting device to any receiver within range. Not exactly private or secure. And not without other problems, too. For example, military radios were often jammed by the enemy to disrupt communications. Network-based communications was still to come.

More information on Walkie-Talkies and Handy-Talkies can be found on the US Army Signal Center online museum of Fort Gordon, GA.

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations