Forty years ago the first mobile phone went on sale, the beginning of a new era

He was known in the industry as "the brick" and was seen in many scenes in the 1987 Michael Douglas movie Wall Street. The

was the first portable cellular phone to go on sale

thus opening forty years ago a new era in the telecommunications sector but also in our lives by now hopelessly welded to the telephone, with which we can do everything except, at the moment, coffee.

Cell phone for sale 40 years ago, a new era began

The characteristics of the DynaTac 8000X would make technology reviewers pale today: the device was not pocket-sized but decidedly bulky with a narrow and long rectangular shape that made it look like a walkie-talkie, it weighed 800 grams, it was 25 centimeters tall, you could memorize 30 phone numbers, it took 10 hours to fully recharge the battery, 30 minutes of possible calls and the base price was $3,995, a figure that makes current high-end smartphones appear 'low cost'.

Before making the telephone debut in stores, Motorola, moreover, had taken up the challenge of cell phone calls ten years earlier: in April 1973, in fact, the engineer Martin Cooper had managed to make the first experimental wireless call, for street.

A total of 300,000 of the Dynatac 8000X were sold.

For this first mobile phone model ever marketed, Motorola obtained authorization from the Federal Communications Commission in September 1983.

It had managed to arrive first on the market, a move that allowed it to dominate it until 1998 - when it was overtaken by Nokia - also thanks to other legendary models such as the StarTac.

Now the company is a division of the Chinese group Lenovo.

From the 1980s onwards, the cell phone began a ride towards success, at first contained - it took seven years to reach one million users - then, increasingly rapid, until the disruptive arrival of the iPhone in 2007 which, with the Internet connection and then the

access to the world of apps and services has revolutionized the mobile telephony market, paving the way for smartphones.

A sector that is currently suffering from the global economic crisis and from saturation, especially in more mature markets.

Last year - according to IDC analysts - recorded a -11.3% and forecasts are also decreasing for 2023, with recovery expected in 2024. The boost should come from 5G and foldable phones, a trend that seems consolidate more and more as seen at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ​​which closed a few days ago.

The pioneer Samsung but also the Chinese Oppo, Honor and OnePlus are betting on it.

As we saw at the Catalan telephony world fair, in order to try to entice consumers to make a replacement in the midst of the economic crisis, the manufacturing companies play mostly on some particularities, an enhanced photographic sector, satellite connection, ultra-fast top-up, virtual sims .

Waiting for headsets for virtual and augmented reality to take hold on the market.

According to Mark Zuckerberg,