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18 SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | AUGUST 2024 By Clare Mendez, Resident Did you know cell phones were used as far back as the 1920s? Once radio communications and landline telephones became popular, engineers started working on portable communication devices. In 1920s Germany, train operators began testing wireless communication. In 1924, a company called Zugtelephonie AG started supplying wireless telephone equipment for trains. In the Second World War, military vehicles started using mobile radio systems. Soon afterward, companies worldwide began developing and selling mobile phones for public vehicles. By the 1970s, mobile telephone networks vastly improved and the automobile phone prompted the idea of the handheld mobile phone. The first cell phone call was made on April 3, 1973. Motorola engineer, Martin Cooper rang his rival, Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs. Motorola's cell phone was called the Dyna TAC 8000X. It was 9" x 5" x 1" and it weighed around 4.4 lbs. It had to be charged for 10 hours for 30 minutes of talk time. Even though Motorola showcased the world's first cell phone in 1973, it was still a prototype and would take years of work to become available to the public. After 10 years and $100 million in development costs, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (widely referred to as the brick phone) was released to the public and sold for $3,995. The year 1992 was an important year for cell phones. During that year, the first SMS message was sent. Then, in the 2000s, the Blackberry arrived. Blackberrys were all over the business world because they had a calendar feature to keep appointment schedules. They featured a keyboard that they became known for. By this time, the mobile network infrastructure had developed considerably. The Motorola Timeport was the first phone to be used anywhere in the world due to the Global System for Mobile Communications frequency bands. A phone with a camera is pretty common nowadays, but it was a major selling point in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Samsung claims that it manufactured and released the first camera phone but such documentation is not proven. The first Smartphone came out soon afterward. Mobile phone technology had progressed exponentially and each model had better performance, was sleeker, and had something new to offer, such as Bluetooth technology and displayed photos on the screen. In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone. The iPhone had quad- band GSM cellular connectivity internet browsing, a multimedia player, and a telephone all in one device. The next year it introduced the App Store which we are all familiar with. The Android phone offered integration with Google services. Over the last decade, Android phones have become the go-to Operating System for cell phone developers. By 2013, it became the largest mobile phone operating system in the world. The future of cell phones continues to evolve with advancements in foldable displays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration and Augmented Reality (AR), and more. Cell Phone History