Motorola, the US based telecommunication company now owned by Lenovo, pioneered the
mobile phone as we now have it.
Motorola DynaTAC 8000X
The company made the first mobile phone known as the
Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. But prior to that milestone, Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, led the team which produced the DynaTAC 8000x, and made the first phone call from it. Martin Cooper was the first person to make an analog cellular mobile phone call on a prototype in 1973.
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000 was officially released in 1983. The handset offered 30 minutes of talk-time, six hours standby, and could only store 30 phone numbers. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000x was very large compared to phones today. It weighed a whopping 1.1kg and measured in at 228.6x127x44.4mm. Mobile phones today are considered heavy if it exceeds the 160g mark. In essence, the weight of mobile devices has shrunk from basically 1.1kg to a few grams. Amazing!
Big Bucks
The device cost $3995. The exorbitant price of the phone is due to the fact that back in the early days of telephony, mobile handsets weren’t designed with consumers in mind, but rather for business folk and for the affluent. If you purchased a mobile phone in the early 2000s, you’ll understand how expensive those basic feature phones used to be. Meanwhile, its $3,995 price tag in 1984 is roughly equivalent to $9,410 in 2017.
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X took roughly 10 hours to reach full charge. It had an LED display for dialing numbers. ‘DynaTAC’ was an abbreviation of “Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage.”
Several other Motorola models followed after the DynaTAC 8000. The DynaTAC was replaced by the more portable Motorola MicroTAC first introduced in 1989, and then by the Motorola StarTAC in 1996.
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This article was first published on 5th April 2018
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Tobenna is a writer, programmer and musician who is passionate about God, tech, and music. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook by clicking the icons below.
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