The mobile phone is 50 years old

Half a century after the American engineer Martin Cooper invented the mobile phone or cell phone, this device has become one of the great human revolutions, even surpassing the land line, and is used by more than 68% of the population.

An average of five hours are used per day, and assuming that a person sleeps an average of between 7 and 8 hours per day, the numbers indicate that users spend 30% of their lives awake using a mobile phone, according to the Global Digital Brief 2023, produced by Datareportal in association with Meltwater and We Are Social.

Next Monday, April 3rd, is the 50th anniversary of Cooper’s call to Joel Engel, a competition researcher. Cooper picked up a Motorola DynaTac 8000X to tell him, “Joel, I’m calling from a cell phone. For real.” Silence was the response he got.

It was a device that weighed almost 1 kilogram, took 10 hours to charge and barely 30 minutes of battery life.

This invention led to the smartphones or “smartphones” in use today that actually work with 5G technology, a generation that is already well on its way to G.

There was no foreboding that this mobile phone call could perform all the functions that a telephone would have provided today.

Its inventor, Cooper (Chicago, 1928) recently recalled in an interview with EFE that when he set out to make this call to Engel, a researcher at Bell Laboratories, he did not imagine that in the future digital cameras or the Internet would be integrated into these devices.

However, Cooper predicted that everyone would have a mobile phone.

This mobile phone has been derived after half a century to advanced smart phones, which are devices with the power necessary to be used as computers. The hardware range is foldable, non-folding, extendable, light or heavy. 92.3% of mobile phones have access to the Internet.

Revolution 5.440 million users

Fernando Suarez, president of the College of Computer Engineers in Spain, explained to EFE that this invention has become one of the “great revolutions of humanity because of the change it has made in our lives, even beyond the landline phone.”

Suarez recalls that if it took nearly 65 years for a traditional phone to reach 100 million users, then a mobile phone did not take fifty years to reach 6,000 million.

Its use is growing year by year, and according to the 2023 Global Digital Digest Report, a total of 5.440 million people use it.

Mobile users increased by just over 3% over the past year, with 168 million new users in the past 12 months.

The average usage rate is also increasing. Seven more minutes on average in 2022 compared to 2021.

An average of five hours of use comes from the analysis data, which is based on a selection of the largest markets. If usage were the same for all markets, that would mean combined mobile phone usage would be 10 trillion hours per year.