My first cell phones were state-of-the-art at the time, but if you saw them today, you'd laugh. This of course included the battery pack to power up to 3 Watt phone.
You see, at that time not very many people had the cell phones and they were very expensive.
Another one of my first phones was a Audiovox 1000 model, which was quite large and it was mounted in my car, a car phone - cell phone. The box that ran the Cell Phone was mounted under the seat, and there was a cradle that held the headset. The headset had a cord on it just like a phone at home, before the cordless phones that is. This Cell Phone or car cell phone was wired directly to the battery with a couple of fuses. When I turned on the vehicle, the Cell Phone would automatically turn on. Folks today take all this for granted, as they don't realize how cumbersome the original cell phones were, or how stupid they were compared to modern day smart cell phones. Today they give you a free cell phone when you sign up for service - back then you had to pay $1000 for a car cell phone, and as much as a couple hundred dollars to have it installed. Often people today do not realize what it was like before mobile cell phones. Anyone who is in business now over the age of 50 certainly realizes, because they remember a time when there were no cell phones.
Business People who didn't smoke filled their ashtrays with coins so they can stop and use the pay phone. When cell phones first came into play they displaced the old Motorola technology of push to talk phones, which worked off a mountaintop repeaters, these phones were very big in the military, construction industry, and all the executives with large corporations had them.
Since this was radio technology, they worked farther than the first cell phones which had to be within 10 to 15 miles of a cell tower. Today, the cell phones are less wattage than they were back then, so the average cell tower is 6 miles or less apart. Back then the cell phones worked off three Watts, and now with 3G technology the wattage is under 1 W. Although, there were studies here in the United States, you would be hard-pressed to find those research studies and data on brain tumors, brain cancer, and their relation to the cell phones that people used. At the time I was literally running 1000 to 1200 minutes per month and although that service was much cheaper than the other choices such as the Iridium Satellite Phones, non-cell phone mobile units, as they did not use cell towers, rather satellites - you can imagine the costs of the original cells. The other mobile phones at the time were not cell tower-based phones, they were push-to-talk and came in a brief case - it was considered quite James Bond at the time. Many of the businessmen who owned corporate jets had these types of phones. Later, just as cell phones came into play, someone came up with the idea of 1.5 way and two-way pagers. Two-way text messaging via cell phones is merely a re-introduction of that similar technology. Once people had cell phones they didn't need to use the text pagers anymore, and that technology was leapfrogged as the price of the cell phone services was lower, as competition increased between companies like Sprint and AT&T. The cell phone industry grew so fast in the late 80s and early 90s, that eventually there was coverage everywhere. I can tell you this - my first cell phones were much more powerful and worked much better than the cell phones of today.
Fast forward to today and now no one goes anywhere without a cell phone. Social researchers have noted fewer people wearing wrist watches. They don't need a wristwatch because that is a standard feature on all cell phones now. It seems that the wrist-watch replaced the pocket watch, and the cell phones seem to be replacing just about everything. These days people use their cell phone or smart phones to do their e-mails, and these same phones act like a PDA, no one carries day planners anymore, although a few people do, myself included perhaps out of habit from using a day planner from the time I was 12 years old in my business until I was in my mid-40s. Today with many laptop notebooks, PDAs, and smart phones, it seems none of that other stuff is needed. Today, our cell phones have changed the entire dynamics of our society. There are unspoken etiquette issues of cell phone use in public. There are rules when we can use our cell phones and when we can't. Issues such as driving with a cell phone and the number of auto deaths which occur while people are driving and talking on the phone at the same time. Our smart phones are becoming super cell phones that have more and more features, such as the ability to store music like the iPod, and vast amounts of data like our electronic PDAs. One recent study in the cell phone industry noted that 90% of the people who own cell phones have never used all the features, and do not know how to program them, or even that they exist on their cell phone. Some allow you to use your cell phone to do remote programming too.
Cell phones and our current smart phones are no exception. It's hard to say the future what types of new features in our cell phones will have. The early adopters of such cell phone and smart phone technologies are willing to spend big bucks to have all-in-one devices. Our on-line Think Tank came up with a plan to produce a PhD or Personal Health Device, which tracks your diet - on your cell phone. The smart phone would have a scanner system on it, later subsequent versions of this smart phone and personal health device would be able to scan products via RFID tags. GPS systems by way of smart phones or cellular high-tech phones is quite possible (now available), and you don't even need satellites to do it. Google Phone and social networking connections appear to be on horizon. One recent study of cell phone users was able to have a 93% predictability of where a person might be based on the patterns determined by their cell phone, and when it was connected to any given local cell tower. Consider if you will the use of technology in Tiananmen Square - should governments be worried about your smart phone technology, or the future of 4G wireless cell phones? There are many cell phones that allow you to use speech recognition to dial phone numbers, search your databases, or navigate the screens on your cell phone. Your cell phone will even become a payment device, hooked to your credit card information. All this technology exists today.
We've recently seen at Comdex and CES shows the first generations of projection cell phones, that is to say video conference enabled cell phones which allow you to project to the other party onto the nearest wall or onto a table so you can watch.
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