82-year-old Father of the cell phone buys new smartphone every 2 months

[ShyWriter]

82-year-old Father of the cell phone buys new smartphone every 2 months

By Brad Reed May 9, 2011 06:54 AM ET

Network World - Martin Cooper isn't just the father of the cellular phone - he's also an avid user.

Cooper, who made the world's first cellular phone call as a Motorola executive in 1973 and who now serves as CEO of wireless software company ArrayComm, says he buys a new smartphone every two months just to keep himself up-to-date on the newest technological trends. Before he most recently bought the LTE-capable HTC Thunderbolt, he was the owner of a Motorola Droid X and an iPhone 4, which he promptly gave away to his grandson after making an upgrade.

Read about other tech industry living legends

Needless to say, the 82-year-old Cooper says he couldn't have imagined how far mobile phones have come since he developed the first working mobile phone in the 1970s. In this question-and-answer session, we'll pick Cooper's brain about the history of cell phones, the Federal Communications Commission's wireless spectrum policies and how wireless devices have evolved so rapidly over the past 40 years.

What made you decide to create a mobile phone that went beyond the car phones that began popping up a few years earlier?

At the time we were in the business of providing portable communications to businesspeople, police departments and fire departments, and everything we learned about portability we learned from our customers. The best example I've got is when the superintendent of police in Chicago came to us and said, "My patrolmen are stuck in their cars but my constituency is the people, so I need my officers to be out on the streets." So that was one of the reasons we started learning about portability.

Then AT&T comes along and says, "We've got a new way of serving a lot of people using a limited amount of spectrum," and their solution was the car phone. And the reason that we built the first cell phone was not to change history but to stop AT&T from building a retrograde technology. For 100 years we were told by AT&T that the only way to communicate was to be wired to your wall and trapped behind your desk, and now they were going to try to trap you inside your car.

What was the moment when cellular phones went from luxury goods to staple consumer devices?

The first cellular systems didn't become commercially available until 1983. Most of the phones before then were in fact car phones. Even though we had designed the technology for true portability, most of the systems at that time were not designed for it. We found there were generally two types of people who used these phones: The first group was interested in having mobile phones as status symbols but the second group was made up of people who were more interested in having a new way to conduct business. So gradually you had people who were not in the top income classes using mobile phones in their daily lives.

Page One of Two..

1 2 Next page

--END

Shy

[ThexDarksider]

Someone has too much money... While I use social manipulation to get stuff for free (just kidding of course), people like these actually buy everything. Why not donate to a worthwhile charity?