Mobile phone technology has come a long way since the first mobile phone call was made 40 years ago – but there is a lot more innovation ahead, according to one expert. 
 
 It was on 3 April 1973 that Motorola employee Martin Cooper made a call in New York on a Motorola DynaTAC – dubbed a "brick" due to its size and weight – which was widely regarded globally as the first public mobile phone call. 
 
 The device was 9 inches tall, comprised 30 circuit boards, had a talk-time of 35 minutes, and took 10 hours to recharge. 
 
 Four decades on, a worldwide telecoms industry with annual revenues of £800bn has grown rapidly based on wide choice, falling prices and an array of technologies, resulting in the average mobile being used to take photos, play music and games, send emails, download maps, watch video clips, all as well as talking and texting. 
 
 Mike Short, an expert from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said Cooper's phone call is the first public call people recognise as being a cellular mobile call. 
 
 He said the 10 years following that first call were "very much developmental", with research being carried out in laboratories before services were launched in 1981 in the US. 
 
 "Since its first use 40 years ago, the mobile phone has completely changed our lives. The first decade was a research or a 'demonstrator' phase, rapidly followed by analogue networks deployed over 10 years from the early 1980s largely based on carphones and used in business in the developed world. 
 
 "This soon led to the digital decade mainly between 1993 and 2003 when consumerisation and globalisation of mobile really took off. 
 
 "This led to a further data adoption phase with the arrival of 3G and during 2003 to 2013 access to the internet and the wider use of smartphones became a reality," he said. 
 
 The two most significant developments in mobile phone technology have been the widespread availability of devices and their ability to access the internet, Short said. 
 
 "In the early days of mobile, consumerisation was not considered. It was made for men in suits in business, whereas consumerisation followed much later. 
 
 "And then access to the internet followed much later again. The first smartphones weren't until about five years ago. So the pace of change has actually sped up over the 40 years, particularly in the past 15 to 18 years," he said. 
 
 Short expects mobile technology to continue to evolve and said people can expect even more developments in future. 
 
 "More changes are expected. The early days of mobile were all about voice, whereas today it's much more about data. 
 
 "And the point about data is that we can carry voice calls over the data channel, but in future we'll move towards fuller data services such as video – much more video to video calling, much more screens on the wall in your home, maybe more video television downloaded, catchup TV, that sort of thing. 
 
 "So there's a lot more innovation to come, particularly in the data and video worlds," he said. 
 
 Mobile phone users will have noticed these changes in the last few years, as phones have become more affordable and sit lightly in the palm of their hand – but innovators are working to enhance these aspects of modern devices further. 
 
 Short said: "The cost has already fallen a long way. What tends to happen is you get more functionality per pound spent. 
 
 "That would include more memory, that would include more features, that would include more capability to access the internet at higher speeds. 
 
 "The weight has dropped dramatically already, but we're seeing, probably this year, the first watch-based phones." 
 
 With improvements and changes implemented so frequently, Dr Short said it is hard to know what exactly to expect in the next 40 years, but it is safe to assume millions more people in the world will have access to mobile phones. 
 
 "It's very difficult to predict 40 years' time because the pace of innovation is speeding up. I would say that we'll all be mobile, globally, everyone will be mobile. 
 
 "I'd also say that we'll be connecting many more machines via wireless mobile technology as well. 
 
 "The world of around 7bn devices connected today should be in excess of 70bn connected devices in 40 years' time," he said. ||||| It was actually to the guy that was running the whole Bell System cellular program. Joel Engel was in effect... I was running the whole Motorola cellular program, I was a division manager at that time, and he was the AT&T equivalent. I have to tell you, to this day, he resents what Motorola did in those days. They thought that we were a gnat, an obstacle. They had a vision, and their vision was that they were going to run this thing, and do it in their way... and of course, as I mentioned before, we believed in competition and lots of players. And we also believed — our religion was portables, because people are mobile. And here they were trying to make a car telephone and a monopoly on top of that. So that battle was the reason that we built that phone. We built the phone to prove to the world that you didn't have to have a monopoly running the business, you didn't have to have those resources to make cellular a reality. 
 
 The most important thing in cellular... sure, I'm proud of having conceived of the first cellphone, but the idea of why that was done was much more a sense of pride. That was we had to beat AT&T — we had to beat the monopoly. And remember, that wasn't the same AT&T as today. We took on, this little company in Chicago, took on the biggest company in the world by every measure. And we beat 'em. If AT&T had won and they would still be a monopoly — by the way, that's starting to happen again, and I hope that doesn't happen... 
 
 Good for you. Just to get to the end of the story, I invented a box where you could plug these oscillators in. And at that time adjusting the oscillators was really a problem, you had to have very fancy measurement equipment to do it. Well, this box had a precision oscillator, and all you had to do was plug the oscillator into it, you had an adjustment on the top, and a light would flash. And when the light stopped flashing you'd hear a tone, and when the tone got down to nothing you were exactly on frequency. So I conceived of the principle of doing that, and this happened with whatever frequency channel device you had. So I thought about the idea to design the circuitry. I had people build it, we went into production, I marketed the thing, and I tell you, you really learn a lot doing those things. So that was kind of important at that stage of my career. 
 
 "I really don't think [the LightSquared] problem exists. I think the FCC decision was more political than technical." 
 
 What developments in mobile in the years since have surprised you the most? 
 
 Remember, when we made that first portable — you've seen pictures of it, I assume — there were no large-scale integrated circuits. There were no digital cameras. There were no personal computers. There was certainly no internet, no world wide web. So how could you ever imagine that in my lifetime there would be tens of millions of transistors in a cellphone? And doing all the things you could do with that computing power. It happened gradually enough so that I don't think there was any moment of surprise, but I'm still amazed. 
 
 Every time I look at a cellphone and see how we struggled in the old days... you know, the reason we built that first phone, people believe the story that it was built in three months, which it was. But in order to do that, we had to have a computer, which at that time was just kind of a medium-scale computer, that had a low enough drain to put it in a cellphone. So we had been struggling with this drain thing, and even with that, the DynaTAC had a battery life of 20 minutes, 20 minutes of talking. And it took the best technology available to make that happen, and now we complain if you can't get two days, and instead of running a couple thousand transistors, you're running 10 or 20 million transistors. Quite incredible. 
 
 The competitive landscape in the American wireless market is very different than in the old AMPS days where we had two carriers. Do you think we're in a healthy market now? How could it be improved? 
 
 Oh, it absolutely could be improved. You know, I was completely opposed to the AT&T / T-Mobile merger. I really hope LightSquared fixes their problem, because I really don't think that problem exists. I think the FCC decision was more political than technical. But the more competition, the better. The only problem is that the carriers have not yet really learned how to compete. With the exception of the carriers that you're familiar with that are competing on price, the product line at AT&T and at Verizon and at every other big carrier are almost identical. 
 
 So, is that competition? Well, in a way it is. They are certainly competing on performance. But at some point, the systems are all going to be functioning, they're all going to be LTE, so they're going to need to do something to differentiate themselves so they can serve some customers better than others. And that, I think, is the next stage in the industry. Somehow or another, we need to start customizing. People are different from each other, and they ought to have a wide variety of phones. Every year when I hold a discussion about all these smartphones... for all practical purposes, they're almost identical. You have to be an expert like you are to discriminate between the Bionic and the RAZR and the Galaxy. The differences are almost subtle. And yet, the differences between people are quite remarkable. So you ought to be able to go into a store or go on the web and order a phone that has exactly the characteristics that you want. Just like you do when you buy a car. My wife has forced me to wear designer jeans, and I find... there must be two or three hundred different kinds of jeans you can wear, all of which are made out of denim and look roughly the same. People are different. They have different tastes, different bodies. Cellphones ought to be the same. ||||| Mobile phones: 40 years of handsets in pictures 
 
 As we reach the 40th anniversary of the first public mobile phone call, we look back at four decades of innovation, from the 'brick' handsets of the 1970s and 1980s to today's smartphones. Expert Mike Short says: 'Since its first use 40 years ago, the mobile phone has completely changed our lives. The first decade was a research or a 'demonstrator' phase, rapidly followed by analogue networks deployed over 10 years from the early 1980s largely based on carphones and used in business in the developed world. This soon led to the digital decade mainly between 1993 and 2003 when consumerisation and globalisation of mobile really took off. This led to a further data adoption phase with the arrival of 3G and during 2003 to 2013 access to the internet and the wider use of smartphones became a reality' ||||| There were no digital cameras, no personal computers, and certainly no Internet in 1973. 
 
 But there were cell phones. Well, one anyway. 
 
 On April 3, 1973, from a Manhattan street corner -- 6th Ave. between 53rd and 54th -- Motorola’s Martin Cooper placed the world’s first mobile phone call. To his rival, no less. 
 
 “I was running the whole Motorola cellular program, I was a division manager at that time, and he was the AT&T equivalent,” Cooper told tech site the Verge last year, on the 39th anniversary of that phone call. “I have to tell you, to this day, he resents what Motorola did in those days.” 
 
 Cooper called Joel Engel from Bell Systems to tell him that the race to perfect cellular tech was over -- Motorola had done it first. Cooper's exact words on that call weren’t recorded the way Samuel Morse’s first telegraph message was (“what hath god wrought”) or Alexander Graham Bell’s first phone call (“Watson, come here. I want to see you”). He reportedly said something like, "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end." 
 
 The gadget he used is well known, however. 
 
 The prototype version that would become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x weighed 2.5 pounds, had a single-line, text-only LED screen. It would take a decade before Motorola’s DynaTAC finally reached consumer hands. 
 
 On September 21, 1983, Motorola made history when the FCC approved the 8000X, the world's first commercial portable cell phone. It cost consumers a whopping $3,995 at the time. 
 
 And the hunk of cream-colored plastic and wires Cooper used looks preposterous next to the sleek modern iPhones and Androids today’s consumers rely upon, of course. 
 
 Even Cooper has moved on: today he relies on a Motorola RAZR -- or at least he did last year, he told The Verge. Cooper remains a pioneer in cell phones; he told the site he gets a new one every six months. 
 
 “I'm being sorely tested lately because the phones are coming out so fast. Each time they get a little better, and I think they're pretty much on a par now — if you know how to use them — with the iPhone,” he told The Verge. ||||| The first mobile phone call was made 40 years today, on April 3, 1973, by Motorola employee Martin Cooper. Using a prototype of what would become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, the world’s first commercial cell phone, Cooper stood near a 900 MHz base station on Sixth Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets, in New York City and placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey. 
 
 The substance of the call is lost to history, but it probably doesn’t compare to the first telegram (“What hath God wrought”), first telephone call (“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you”), or even the first text message (“Merry Christmas”). Cooper’s inaugural mobile conversation is remembered as, “I’m ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end,’ or something to that effect.” 
 
 Regardless, the call was a major step in the development of mobile technology, though it would take another decade for the DynaTAC to reach consumers and two more decades for cell phones to overtake land lines in worldwide usage. But today, “phone” is synonymous with “mobile phone,” and the latest trend is toward mobile devices that aren’t really phones much at all. Motorola’s mobile business, meanwhile, is now owned by Google. 
 
 Here’s a look at the evolution of mobile devices from the first commercially available DynaTAC to the smartphones of today:
– Give someone a call on your smartphone today, and you'll be celebrating history: It's been 40 years since the first mobile phone call was made, the Guardian reports. That first call was placed by Motorola worker Martin Cooper in New York City on April 3, 1973, using a so-called "brick" of a phone: the Motorola DynaTAC. Some nine inches tall, the DynaTac let you talk for 35 minutes using its 30 circuit boards. It took 10 hours to recharge. It's not exactly known what Cooper said during that conversation in midtown Manhattan, but it was something like, "I’m ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end," Quartz reports. Who did Cooper call? His rival, he told the Verge in an interview last year: Bell Labs' Joel Engel. The next decade was largely devoted to research; the first cell phone for commercial use got the FCC's OK on Sept. 21, 1983—the Motorola 8000x, which sold for $3,995, reports Fox News. The Guardian has photos of the history of mobile phones.