Revolutionary Change

[LarryHoward]

Cell phone tech has been around for a while. I can remember using a "bag phone" as a Senior Shore Patrol Officer in 1990, now 27 years ago. It took that big battery pack to give me 8 hours of service and cost per call was very significant. My Motorola StarTac purchased in 1992 was a compact evolution.

10 years ago, the iPhone was invented. Today the voice call is only single digit percentages of what a modern PDA provides. We didn't know we needed it until it was invented.

10 years.

[Tim Ford]

Wife just said the same thing: 10 years. Seems like longer though.

How was life even possible without these damned things?

[Orestes Munn]

Meetings are certainly more bearable and now I can monitor the output of each one of my 17 rooftop PV panels!

Remember when these banditti charged about 10,000 times more per bit for text than voice?

Not strictly à propos, but Navionics seems to have raised their annual price for iPad charts from 50 to 80. Forget that. I just downloaded the Fugawi quilted rasters for 10.

[LarryHoward]

Well, the "monetization" on the data is not without its challenges. As Beau would probably tell us, it's not free so if we don't like ads, we better get used to buying or renting it. It is amazing how much bandwidth some of the newer aps take when out of 4G coverage (out of major metro areas). I think the presumption is that all users have pervasive 4G coverage.

[TheOffice]

I put a car phone in my 89 Maxima. It was so cool!
Analog. Archaic by today's standard, but it was a huge step forward.

Waiting to see if the new iridium birds bring down the price of sat phone service. Hoping for a similar revolution, but not expecting it.

[kimbottles]

I had a portable ham radio 2 meter rig that could access automated phonepatching as early as 1969-1970.

A long time ago I was a cool kid. Not so much any more.....

[Jamie]

My first cell phone was an analog Motorola MicroTac. Made me big man on the streets of Taipei!

Cell phones were called DaGeDa - Big Brother Big - because of those Motorola phones.

[Tucky]

My first cell phone was a bag/car Motorola. I came upon a car accident one day, the ambulance people were already there. The woman on the stretcher was frantic because she was a driver for handicapped kids and was desperate to let someone know she would not be able to make a pickup. I ran back to my car and brought back the bag phone and asked what's the number and handed her the phone. She and the ambulance people were speechless. I remember her saying "I'm calling from the middle of the street" when she reached her office and the driver looking at me and saying "we are going to have to get one of those things". This in 1988 or so.

A friend owned with his family one of the local providers. I remember him making a call from his Concordia in Penobscot Bay to one of their towers west of Portland- that is probably 100 miles, before the towers were public. Analog phone. From southern Maine my calls would sometimes jump to a cell on Cape Cod and I would get these massive roaming charges- I was glad it was my friend's company and could get the charge reduced. The call that woman made from the stretcher probably cost me 5 bucks. I was careful with the calls then:-)

[BeauV]

I'm an addict. I must have had every mobile phone ever sold. First one looked like a lunch pail with an antenna.

How did Motorola lose the market?

[LarryHoward]

I'm an addict. I must have had every mobile phone ever sold. First one looked like a lunch pail with an antenna.

How did Motorola lose the market?

Easy. Missed the market shift to PDAs that Apple created.

[Jamie]

I'm an addict. I must have had every mobile phone ever sold. First one looked like a lunch pail with an antenna.

How did Motorola lose the market?

Easy. Missed the market shift to PDAs that Apple created.

I think they lost even before that when phones stopped being technology and more fashion. Nokia phones looked cooler and were gsm. I had a Palm Pilot - remember those? What a quaint idea - a stand alone PDA that very kludgily synced to your Outlook.

[Orestes Munn]

I'm an addict. I must have had every mobile phone ever sold. First one looked like a lunch pail with an antenna.

How did Motorola lose the market?

Easy. Missed the market shift to PDAs that Apple created.

I think they lost even before that when phones stopped being technology and more fashion. Nokia phones looked cooler and were gsm. I had a Palm Pilot - remember those? What a quaint idea - a stand alone PDA that very kludgily synced to your Outlook.

Yeah, the PDA thing predates the iPhone by quite a few years.

I had a Palm Pilot too. Barely worth it, but it got me to meetings more reliably than paper calendars. Then I had a long series of Blackberries, several of which rest at the bottom of various tributaries of the Chesapeake. Finally got an iPhone when the gov't caught up, the excuse at the time being that we could look at MRIs on them.

Disagree about Motorola and cool. Their flip phones were the shit for a good while.

[Charlie]

I'm an addict. I must have had every mobile phone ever sold. First one looked like a lunch pail with an antenna.

How did Motorola lose the market?

Beau,

Did you have a Newton?

[SemiSalt]

Waiting out a storm at a mooring in Plymouth, MA in 1968, my uncle and I checked out the facility to patch VHF (I suppose) into a phone call. The call was totally public. I forget how it was billed. Maybe it had to be a collect call.

[BeauV]

I'm an addict. I must have had every mobile phone ever sold. First one looked like a lunch pail with an antenna.

How did Motorola lose the market?

Easy. Missed the market shift to PDAs that Apple created.

LOL - well, yes. But even earlier they were getting clobbered by Nokia. Back in the early '80s, Motorola built the best microprocessors along with the best radios.

They lost the PC to Intel for a very weird reason. IBM purchasing rules were written so that if a division had a strategic relationship with a vendor, other divisions of IBM would have to buy parts through the division with the established relationship. When Easterbrook was building the PC Division, he wasn't willing to work with the MiniComputer division of IBM, so it ruled out Motorola and Intel got the deal. Before I knew about this nutty rule (Which makes sense from a purchasing department viewpoint) I and most others in Silicon Valley thought that IBM had lost its mind buying the x86 vs the Moto-68000.

After the Star-Tack phone, they really started to go downhill. I've no idea why. The didn't even come close to the Nokia phone for quality and features. The radios were always the best, but the rest of the phone didn't measure up.

Then along came Apple and everyone in the phone business got taught a lesson about what happens when your "product" because of a "feature" of a more important device. Oddly, the TV broadcasters and Cable Companies haven't really grokked that fact yet. The percentage of time folks watch TV is crashing, and TV is just an App on a device now, not a "market". I guess that Comcast/AT&T and Fox/NBC etc... will just retreat to providing bandwidth as YouTUBE/Amazon and Video on Apps like Facebook/Pinterest/Instagram/Twitter just take away the market over time. There's no space in the tech biz for folks who don't keep up.

[Panope]

Between 2004 and 2009 I ran a "one man airline" with car shuttle at one end. This meant that while I was flying and driving (often with a passenger seated next to me), I also had to answer the telephone and take bookings.

This meant that I had to have a phone/PDA that could be operated FULLY with ONE HAND. I am talking about BUTTONS. I found the Palm smart phones to be best for that mission. The buttonless smartphones that came after did not work.

Steve

[LarryHoward]

Palm was fairly useless and (once the government got over fear of PdAs, I liked my various blackberries well enough for pure work related use. Really liked the global Blackberry that played pretty much everywhere. I think the full screen and Aps made the IPhone "more than a work tool" and they really captured the young generation first. Generally, incarry what the company provides and the iPhone 5S in my pocket is a great size when I have the IPad Mini for documents, spreadsheets and Scantlings.

[Orestes Munn]

The BB was a hell of a lot easier to type on than the iPhone.

[Panope]

Larry, the web access sucked with the palm, but their calendar was the bomb. Even with this itsy bitsy screen, I could scan all my bookings instantly and effortlessly. Never tried BB. I'm sure the larger buttons would have been nice.

My final palm was my favorite. Tiny, bullet proof, one hand access to everything I needed to run my business while literally RUNNING to my next gig. I did about $250K dollars worth of business ($100 bucks at a time) with this thing.

It felt good in my hand.

[BeauV]

Larry, I almost went with a iPhone-5 because of the smaller size. But the waterproof nature of the iPhone-7 won me over.

(I have told the story about running it through the washer and dryer haven't I??)

[BeauV]

Steve, I shifted from the Palm-7 (which had a cell modem) to the BBerry. Stayed with them until the iPhone got stable. I still have the BBerry. I closed a LOT of business with that BBerry, I'm not giving it up!