Jordan Tolbert

Professor Johnny Gilbert

Cell Phone essay

27 April 2016

Close your eyes and think about this. Imagine not being able to get on snapchat,

Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. Imagine only being able to communicate with your

friends and family would either to be see them face to face, or write a letter and send it

to them. Writing a letter back and forth would be very irritating and that means using

more paper, so, so much for saving trees because thats the only way you can talk to

someone who isnt close to you. Imagine this world without cellphones.

Most of us use or check our cell phone almost every 5 minutes. It seems like

when most of us wake up, that is the very first thing we check, our cell phone. Probably

everyone in here grabs their phone when they wake up to see if that special someone

sent you a good morning text, or check an email, or simply get on social media. Would

we even have social media how it is now without cellphones. I know for sure we

wouldnt have Snapchat! Cell phones play a major part in our daily lives whether you

notice it or not.

Without cellphones, we couldnt have very efficient communication. Us being

here in college, the only way to really communicate with our family back home is by

texting them or calling them with our cell phone. Who wants to go all the way back

home or must find somewhere with a landline and pay to use it when you simply need to

just talk with your mom or dad, or need to remind them about something. That would not

only be a huge drag on your day, but think about all the extra gasoline people would use
by driving their cars back and forth. Were already going to run out of oil someday, so

that would just speed up the process. Today, we should be very thankful for Mr. Martin

Cooper, or the inventor of the cell phone. Without him, communication in todays world

would be very different.

In this month around 40 years ago, Mr. Martin Cooper made the first successful

call on April 3, 1973 on the streets of New York City. The first call was to his main

competitor and nemesis at Bell Laboratories, Joel Engel. Martin Cooper was born on

December 26, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. He was the son of Arthur and Mary Cooper.

After high school, Cooper attended the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and

graduated in 1950, with a degree in electrical engineering. After getting his bachelors,

Cooper decided to join the U.S. navy and served the United States during the Korean

war (June 1950-July 1953). During the war, he was enlisted in the United States naval

reserves, and mostly worked on submarines, destroyers, etc. After getting his masters,

he was employed to a company called the Teletype Corporation of Chicago. Their main

purpose was to make units that provided remote communication services to media

outlets or a publication or broadcast program that provides news, features, or stories to

the public through many distribution channels.

After working for the Teletype Corporation, Cooper joined to be on team Motorola

in Schaumburg, Illinois, and worked there for many years after. When first hired at

Motorola, Cooper was assigned to the department that worked on the first portable

handheld police radios, but weren't later introduced until 1967 in Chicago, Illinois. At this

point, Cooper had advanced positions within Motorola to the position of Operations
Director. During this position, he helped develop the first handheld telecommunications

device or first successful cell phone.

This wasnt the first time a mobile cellphone was introduced, but instead

first appeared in 1946 by AT&T, which stands for American Telephone and Telegraph

Company). The problem with these mobile devices was that in a certain area, around 11

or 12 channels were available, so people had to wait to use it. Another bad thing was

that these mobile devices required large amounts of electricity to power them, therefore

the only thing that was mobile that could run them were cars, so they werent entirely

mobile phones. Calls with these devices were not made the with phone numbers, but

instead carried over VHF signals and that FM radio stations were used. This system

was not the best at all, and in high populated areas, signal was prone to congestion. Not

only was the functional use of the car phones not the best, but they were also very

expensive, costing between $2000 and $4000 to buy and install in the cars.

Soon Motorolas main competitor, AT&T, was working on a new type of mobile

communication device for its subscribers. At the time, AT&T had a monopoly on regular

landlines. If they had made the breakthrough and created the handheld device, they

wouldve had a monopoly on both landlines and cellphones. Soon, Motorola began

working on an approval from the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), for

private companies, like Motorola itself, to operate their communication networks over

radio frequencies. This would help Motorola get into the mobile service market, and help

prevent AT&T from becoming a monopoly for mobile services as well.

In November of 1972, Cooper and his team at Motorola began working on the

first cellphone, and ran their first tests in Washington. The name of it was the Dyna-Tac
(Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage). Motorola workers nicknamed it the shoe

phone because of the design of it. The size of it was 9 inches tall and weighed about

2.5 pounds. It also had a whopping talk time of 35 minutes before the battery would

need a charge. On April 3, 1973, Cooper called his companys rival, Bell Labs, to brag

to Joel Engel about how he was making that call from a portable cell phone. Imagine the

look on their faces!

In July of 1973, Coopers Dyna-Tac made it on the cover of Popular Magazine.

This helped Motorola get the approvals from the FCC for private companies to operate

wireless communications over radio frequencies. This also help boost profile within the

company, and Cooper was made a Division Manager in 1977, and then next Vice

president and Corporate Director for research and development a year later. Later the

next year, Cooper left Motorola and founded his own company, Cellular Business

Systems, Inc. (CBSI), and became the leading company and billing cellular cell phone

services. During the same, year, Motorola released the first portable cell phone for the

public, the Dyna-Tac 8000x. It had a hefty price tag of $3,995 plus tax. In 1986,

Coopers company, Cellular Business Systems was sold to Cincinnati Bell.

Even though the Dyna-Tac 8000x was released to the public in 1983, mobile

phones didnt make good sales or use until the early 1990s. In 1992, Cooper signed on

with Arraycomm Inc., in Del Mar, California. His position was chair and chief executive.

The evolution of cell phones has come a very, very long way from where it

started, to the cellphones we have today. According to

computersciencedegreehub.com, the number of mobile subscribers in 1985 was 340,

213. Today that number has drastically risen to 300,520,098. The first cell phones
invented were very large, and looked like tan bricks. They also included very small

screens and large antennas on the phone. In todays time antennas are nothing but a

thing of the past, but back then they had to be on the cell phone for it to work. The first

few phones also had no screen or just a small screen to show who you have dialed. The

first cellphones basically had 3 functions, dial, re-dial, and talk Thats it. As I

mentioned before, the cost of the first cell phones were extremely expensive, costing

thousands of dollars. Today, there isnt really many phones on the market that are over

a grand. If that was the case, we wouldnt have an abundance of cell phones like we

have now.

During the 90s, the only mobile cell phones that were released on the

marketplace were the Motorola Dyna-Tac 8000x (1983), and the Motorola MicroTac

9800x (1989). Beginning in the 90s, Nokia decided to only concentrate on making

mobile phones, so from then on until about 2006 or 2007. In 1992, Nokia came out with

the Nokia 101. It looks very smaller than the bricks that were available in the 80s, also

didnt have a huge antenna like the previous Motorola phones. This time period of the

90s to about late 2003 was the Candybar era or Nokia, candybar meaning the

style/look of the phone. It was about the size of a candybar.

A major contributor of cell phones today came into the marketplace of cellphones

in 1997. That company is Samsung Electronics. In the following year, Nokia became the

leading global mobile phone manufacturer. Nokia phones dominated the 90s producing

new mobile devices almost every year. Most key characteristics of these phones were

them usually being no bigger than a candybar, usually pretty thick, with small screens

usually displaying phone, contacts, dial, re-dial, signal bars, and battery life.
 Around the early 2000s, cell phones technology began to advance with more

features like colored screens, SMS, alarms, of the early 00s was the Nokia 6000 series.

Their popularity stemmed from the customization of the phone by replacing the front

faceplate with different colors. As the 00s progressed, so did the rise of SMS, or text

messaging. As with the rise of text messaging, mobile phone manufacturers began

producing a variety of phones that included size QWERTY keyboards. Examples of

these include the Sidekick exclusively from T-Mobile, or the Samsung Reclaim.

Popularity with these phones mostly stemmed from teens and adolescents.

In 2005, that was the year Motorola produced a phone that almost everyone had,

and also the color options of this phone, the RAZR. This phone was slim and thin

compared to phones in the marketplace circa 2004/2005. Back in those days, I had a

RAZR two times. I had a silver one first, and then an orange one. I really loved those

phones. I remember how you could record something and set it as your ringtone. I

thought that was the coolest thing ever. In 2005, this was also the year where Samsung

was preferred more for cell phones that Sonys.

2007 was a huge turning point for cellphones everywhere. This was the year

Apple produced its first iPhone 3G, along with iOS 1.1.1. This was so new for everyone

because of the abundance of features including GPS, camera, iPod, email, safari,

YouTube, calendar and more useful phone utilities. 2 years later in 2009 Apple released

the iPhone 3GS and sold 1 million iPhones in its opening weekend. As iPhone became

more and more popular, Nokia began to fall off as the leading mobile phone producer.

That same year, Nokia experienced its first quarterly loss, in more than decade because

of the popularity of the Android operating system, which was also on the rise at the time.
 In 2010 came the release of the iPhone 4, which had the color option of white.

This was a first time a phone came in white for Apple, and was a great advancement for

business. The Samsung Galaxy was also introduced that same year and these two

today are the main competitors on the market. In 2011, Apple and Samsung continued

to better their flagship devices with the release of the iPhone 4s and the Samsung

Galaxy II. The iPhone 4s also featured Siri, the personal assistant and knowledge

navigator for iPhone. In 2012, Samsung and Apple introduced the iPhone 5 and

Samsung with the Galaxy S3. Apple sold a staggering amount of 5,000,000 units the

first weekend. The iPhone 5 was also significant because for the first time of iPhone

history, Apple increased the size of the display. It was also in 2011, that the former CEO

of Apple resigned his CEO position to make way for the new and current CEO of Apple,

Tim Cook. This year was also the year that Steve Jobs died, due to cancer on October

5. Nokia also joined with Microsoft that year, stating that Nokia phones will now use

Microsofts operating system. One consequence of this is that 14,000 jobs from Nokia

are cut worldwide. In 2012 Samsung took the crown from Nokia and became the worlds

leading manufacturer of mobile phones.

In the following year, 2013, Apple releases the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. With

the 5s, it included a feature that is still relevant in todays and the future iPhones, the

fingerprint authentication reader, used to unlock iPhones and more, as well as the new

gold color available for consumers. The iPhone 5c was the budget iPhone, and was

only $99 with a two-year contract. This iPhone was also the first to sport more colors

than just black, white or gold. It had a palette of white, green, yellow, pink, or blue. HTC

also released a very highly favored Android that year, the HTC One. Nokia also sells its
company to Microsoft for 7.18 billion. That year, Apple also released the newly

revamped iOS 7. This update gave Apples software an entire different look.

In 2014, Apple released the screen size with both phones, with the iPhone 6

being 4.7 inches and the iPhone 6 plus being 5.5 inches. In 2015, Apple once again

released its successors to the iPhone 6/6 plus The iPhone 6s/6s plus. Apple also

brought another new color to its palette, rose gold. Along with Apple, Samsung released

the Galaxy s5 in 2014, the Galaxy s6 in 2015, and the galaxy s7 this year in March.

These phones also included a fingerprint scanner that could be used to unlock the

device, etc.

In todays market, Android and iPhone dominate the cellphone market. On

techradar.com, they give the full scoop of the best smartphones and rates them from 1-

10. Tech Radar is a publication online that focuses on new technology, news, and

reviews of all types of technology, especially mobile phones. This list is the top 10 best

smartphones in America according to Tech Radar:

1. Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge

2. Samsung Galaxy s7
3. iPhone 6s
4. Samsung Galaxy Note 5
5. LG G4
6. iPhone 6s Plus
7. Samsung Galaxy s6 Edge+
8. Nexus 6P
9. iPhone SE
10. HTC One M9
Since the invention of cellphones, there has been an extreme amount of change seen

the industry. Nobody back then didnt think cell phones would be as great as they are

today. What would the world be like without todays smartphones? We wouldnt have all

the apps, games, social media, and more everyone enjoys on their cell phone.