Mobile Phone Inventor: Today's Cellphones Are Too Complicated

Martin Cooper, who was the lead engineer of the Motorola team that developed the mobile phone, told a privacy conference in Madrid this week that today's phones try to do many things for too many people.

“Whenever you create a universal device that does all things for all people, it does not do any thing well,” said the 80 year-old, who made the first wireless call from a busy Manhattan street corner on April 3 1973.

The original Motorola DynaTAC handset, weighed 2.2 pounds and had 35 minutes of talk time. By 1983 and after four iterations, Cooper’s team had reduced the handset’s weight by half. The list price was around $4,000.

Telegraph