Calling the competition
Cooper says he called Joel Engel of Bell Labs, who led a rival project, from the prototype on the street and told him he was calling from a mobile phone. At the time Bell Labs was developing car phones.
The brick
The DynaTAC 8000X went on sale in 1983. Its shape and weight earned it the nickname “the brick”. It charged for ten hours and lasted half an hour of talk. Even so it was a status symbol and appeared in 1980s films.
What followed
Phones shrank and gained digital GSM networks, SMS and finally the internet. Today's smartphone is millions of times more powerful than the computers that guided the 1969 Moon landing.