CNN has a
great interview online with Martin Cooper
, the Motorola engineer whose team invented the first mobile phone back in 1973.
Ronald Regan got ahold of the prototype and wanted one immediately, but as Cooper points out, back then it would have cost about a million dollars to buy one. It took another ten years for Motorola to put out a commercially available product, and even that cost a cool $10,000 in today's money. It took almost another decade for affordable phones to really hit the market.
Ironically, Cooper is now using a $5000 Vertu, the ludicrously luxury phones made by Nokia's high-end subsidiary. But as an Android booster, I was happy to read at the end of the interview that he sees the Google-driven OS catching up - and possibly overtaking - the iPhone.
One thing that this piece made me realise is how fast and far the great can fall - and rise - in the mobile industry. Motorola invented the things, but became pretty much irrelevant as Nokia truly mastered the art art of the mass-market mobile. And now, the tides are turning again, with the Motorola Droid X pretty easily whooping anything Nokia has on the market.
Anyway,
