Martin Cooper picked up a Motorola DynaTac 8000X on April 3, 1973 to name his biggest rival in the industry, Joel Engel of AT&T Bell Labs. He did it from a New York street and said the line, “Don’t you know where I’m calling you from?” This was the first phone call with a mobile phone, but a lot has happened since then and mobile phones are very different.

Cooper was based at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue in New York to announce the scoop. The device he used then weighed around one kiloit was about 33 centimeters high including the antenna, 4.5 centimeters wide and 8.9 centimeters thick. It also took ten hours to charge.

Back then, mobile phones were only for calls, very different from today’s devices which, in addition to facilitating calls, support messaging, internet access, social networking, video games, streaming platforms, virtual campuses to study and banking applications.

It is currently estimated that 67% of the world’s population is a mobile phone user and 63% uses the internet, according to Hotsuite data, as of July 2022. In fact, 55.5 percent of the time internet users spend browsing is done through the smartphone.

On the other hand, fast charging systems, together with the increased capacity of the batteries, have made it possible to extend the daily autonomy and life of mobile phones. The latest developments have led to 240W systems, present in brands such as Oppo and Realme, which offer several hours of use with a few seconds of charging.

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Unlike the first generations of mobile phones, the current ones no longer show antennas. And while they are no longer the ‘bricks’ of yesteryear, users today prefer mobile devices with large screens, which are often difficult to carry in their pockets.