Long March of the mobile… is full circle for Motorola

Google’s announced acquisition of the Motorola’s mobile phone business, brings to an end almost 40 years of cell phone innovation by the pioneer in mobile telecommunications. It was Dr Martin Cooper, general manager for the systems division at Motorola who made the first historic call using a mobile phone, on April 3rd, 1973, while walking the streets of New York. He called Joel Engel, the head of research at Bell Labs. He used the bricksized Motorola Dyna-Tac, a 2.5 pounds handset measuring 9 x 5 x 1.75 inches,with 30 circuit boards, 35 minutes talk time, 10 hours recharge time, and having just three functionalities: dial, talk and listen. Dr Cooper jointly contributed to the patent for what they called the world’s first “portable duplex radio telephone system”.

The first commercial rollout of mobile phone services came in 1978 in Japan from NTT DoCoMo, a company that also launched the world’s first mobile Internet service, iMode, in 1999.
Meanwhile Finland saw the first phone to phone text message in 1993 and Nokia launched the first mobile phone with Internet connectivity and a full QWERTY keyboard – the Nokia Communicator in 1996.

The iPhone from Apple was not the first ‘smart’ phone – merely the most iconic – when it debuted in 2000; while Google took on operating systems like Symbian and Windows Phone with Android – with HTC launching the first handset running Android, the HTC Dream slider phone in 2008.
Now when it fully acquires Motorola Mobility, Google will control all parts of the mobile ecosystem – hardware, OS and application.

See our story in the IT happened in India section, on the Indians behind Motorola’s innovation map. August 16 2011