According to the inventor of the mobile phone, one day phones will become devices integrated into our skin. “The next generation will place the phone under the skin of the ear,” Marty Cooper, known for inventing the first phone in 1973, told CNBC at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.
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Such devices won’t need to be charged because “your body is the perfect charger,” Cooper said. When you eat, your body produces energy, right? It takes very little energy to power this headset,” he says.
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The framework he drew marks a time when our bodies were powered by powerful microchips and sensors.
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For example, a few startups, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, are developing technologies aimed at merging computers with the human brain.
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Cooper’s other comments are as follows: The smartphone has become very complex today, with a large number of applications and a screen that does not conform to the curve of the human face. We never imagined that phones would become the portable computers they are today. 50 years ago it was a really primitive time. There was no internet, no large-scale integrated circuits, no digital cameras. It never occurred to us that one day your phone would be a camera and an encyclopedia. But we knew it was important to make connections. We knew that one day everyone would have a cell phone. And it almost happened.”
50 YEARS HAVE PAST…
While new technologies are remarkable and awe-inspiring, sometimes it is necessary to step back and remember and appreciate past achievements. For example, it has been exactly 50 years since the first wireless cell phone call was made. As much as the story behind this search is entertaining, it also shows how far the industry has come. Also, the inventor’s predictions about the future of mobile technology are an important lesson.
FIRST LOOKING FOR ITS COMPETITOR
Imagine you are Motorola engineer Martin Cooper on April 3, 1973. You walk the streets of downtown Manhattan to make the world’s first cell phone call and pioneer the era of wireless networking. Who are you looking for? Your family, friends or colleagues? No… As a journalist, photographer, and a few on the street witness you make history, your competitor Dr. You call Joel S. Engel and brag about your success.
“There was silence on the other side,” Cooper said in an interview with the BBC in 2011. “I think he’s grinding his teeth.” It can be difficult to understand how revolutionary this call was, which many compare to the first phone call Alexander Graham Bell made in Boston on March 10, 1876.
DynaTAC 8000XThe device that made this possible was the first prototype of the DynaTAC 8000X, which later became the world’s first wireless cell phone. Previously, people were using wired “car phones” that were introduced in 1946 and, as Cooper put it, “trapped you in your car.”
We can easily say that DynaTAC is a true engineering marvel and its price reflects this. The phone was commercially available in the US on March 6, 1983, over the 1G network, priced at US$3,995 (equivalent to approximately US$12,000 in 2023) with a charge offering 10 hours of standby time and only 30 minutes of talk time. Voicemail was also very popular during this period.
The advent of 2G
2G was first launched nearly a decade later, in 1991. Shortly after, in 1995, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) was introduced, helping people save money by allowing calls over the internet instead of the cellular network for long distance and international calls. In 1999, the Japanese Kyocera VP-210 became the first camera and video-enabled phone.
Kyocera VP-21050 years after the first cell phone call, there are twice as many phones in the world as there are people today. And thanks to Moore’s Law, smartphones have become so powerful that we now use them not just for communication, but for many different purposes, such as entertainment, business, navigation, education, fitness, translation, data storage, and more.
This progress was also helped by the popularization of the internet in the 1990s and third-party mobile apps in the late 2000s, when Apple introduced the iPhone and the App Store.
Many feel that technological growth has slowed and peaked with smartphones now looking almost the same. While this is true to some extent, there is still much more that we can look forward to that you may not be aware of.
Technology that can be implanted under the skin
“We’re in the infancy of what we call cell phones and personal communication,” Cooper says in an interview. “Imagine how unnatural it is to want to talk to someone and hold a flat piece of material to your head for that purpose. It doesn’t make any sense.” With these sentences, he points to technology that can be implanted under the skin.
According to Cooper’s vision for the future, a world awaits us where technology blends into the background of everyday life, “making the app redundant by having something that creates the app for you.” For example, calling someone should be as simple as having a thought and not require opening an app, entering a number, and pressing a button.
With advances in 6G, mixed reality, smart glasses and Web3, this future is no longer seen as science fiction and could be reached as early as the next 50 years, according to Cooper.
It’s easy to overlook how far we’ve come as humanity. As is evident in one frequently cited example, a modern smartphone is millions of times more powerful than all the combined computing power used in NASA’s 1969 Apollo 11 mission that carried humans to the Moon.
For those who are unaware of the progress taking place behind the scenes, innovation may seem to have stalled. But those working on these innovations know that the next mobile revolution may not be far away.
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