America’s Smartphone Addiction

That pic brings back memories, Sir. I spent about 12 years in that industry.
The early days, circa ’85, there were only 2 carriers in the midwest; Ameritech and Cellular One.
My first car phone was an Audiovox model. Motorola was huge, as they had the experience of being the top dog equipment for police car 2 way communications equipment for many years prior to cell phone technology.

Originally, they were ‘car’ phones. A transceiver was mounted in trunks or behind the seat in pickup trucks. They had 3 hardwire connections:
The data cable joined the transceiver to the handset/ cradle, typically mounted on the transmission hump to between the front passengers, or off to the passenger side of the console, if there were bucket seats. Data cables were a bitch to run and conceal cleanly between the TX in the trunk and the phone handset up front.
The first cell phone transceivers used to be the size of 2 encyclopedias stacked, or bigger.
2nd connection was a 4 wire power cable. 12v +, 12 negative, an ignition sense wire, and a 4th wire for wiring a relay to activate the vehicle horn if an important inbound call occurred when the occupant was away from the vehicle, but close enough to run and answer it. Horn alert feature was optional, and rarely requested except by guys with trucks in the construction industry.
Last, and 3rd cable connection to the ‘trans’ was the antenna. Many varieties. Best performer was a rooftop mount similar to the ones cop cars had. Most salesmen and businessmen who could afford $2k for a car phone did NOT want a hole drilled in the roof or trunk deck lid. Even more so, if their Caddy or Town Car was a 2 year lease.
So, the stick on window mount antennas with the squiggly cork screw in the mast was most popular.
That Panasonic was a modular transportable, but they weren’t the 1st Mfr. to come up with that design. NEC was.
Early on, the cell phone Mfrs. with vision saw that transportability was the trend of the future. i.e. A car phone is nice, but when you’re away from the car, or have a secondary vehicle, you’re shackled if your phone is stuck to just that primary car or truck.
As a portable, the Panasonic and NEC were modular, and had a NiCD battery pack, with a little rubber ‘duckie’ antenna integral to the portable pack, with handle and cradle where the handset could clip in.

Hands Free in the early days was a miniature microphone installed up near the driver’s visor, and the wire hidden along the pillar between windshield and door hinge, and routed under the dash or under the carpet and connected to the handset’s cradle, mounted on the hump or console of the car.

I could tell some interesting / funny / horror stories of installations that went awry.
But, too, even before that Panasonic trans-portable model in Farmer’s picture, Motorola had a true handheld, about the size of a common brick; hence the name Brick Phone.
The in-car models used a full 3 watt transceiver, but the early handhelds only used .06 of a watt of transmit / receiving power.
Back in the early days, cell tower build-out was scarce, so there were dead spots in a given metropolitan coverage area. Consequently, the early handeld’s reliability was sketchy unless you had a cell tower pretty close by.
As you traveled, calls are supposed to get ‘handed off’ from the current tower you were utilizing a data / voice channel on, to the next neighboring tower to maintain the call.
Since early towers were concentrated where the most people would use them, any venturing too far outside the primary coverage area of the towers resulted in dropped calls.

In the midwest, Ameritech was Ma Bells entry into the new technology, but the FCC said each market had to allow a competitor to avoid the landline phone companies in each market to secure a monopoly. In Chicago and midwest, Cellular One was it.
Out west and down south, and in the northeast, it was similar, but with each regions own version of Ameritech or Cellular One. Some TBP monkees will remember the ones in their neck of the woods, I’d bet.
Continuing,
After portability was the next big thing, costs began to lower, as the tech improved, and more Mfrs. got into the game. The ‘bag phone’ became popular when one of the carriers’ agents who sold cell equipment and earned commissions on activation of new lines…
…asked Novatel to design a cheap model cell phone. Then they took the components;
Transceiver (much smaller by 1990), a handset, cradle, power cord via a cigarette lighter outlet cord, and a magnet antenna with a cable routed in through a window and connected, or a ‘rubber duckie’ antenna…and all that shit was stuffed into a tall canvas tote bag in a form of Rube Goldberg transportable phone, at a cheap price. (Say, $500, vs. the former $2k, just 4-5 years previous)…They sold like hotcakes at a church fundraiser.
There was a boatload of money to be made in the accessories for portable cell phones.
Batteries, cases, leather covers, power cords, fancy dash board holders / displays, alternate antenna styles, etc.
Another aspect was how the retailers got compensated.
Agents who sold equipment and activated phone lines for the carriers were paid a $200 commission for each new line activation.
Some companies acted as equipment retailers, but were airtime RESELLERs, who contracted to buy airtime in bulk at lower rates, then acted like the carrier, issuing a bill each month for airtime usage. That was where the big money was, because it was residual income, on a monthly repetitive basis, and the bonanza grew for resellers of airtime.
You saw that when companies like Verizon started giving away free phones, if you signed a 2 year contract for service activation…the big money was in those airtime charges.
People were racking up 1-2 grand in airtime charges. Per month, sometimes, if they were heavy hitters like lawyers, and high level government people.

Then the Motorola ‘flip’ phones came out, and those were all the rage, with a smaller pull up antenna just 4 inches tall, about the size of a Parker pen refill stylus, if you will.
Still, back then, batteries were NiCD, and running out of juice too soon was a problem.
Then, as the technology improved, the handhelds got smaller and smaller.
I remember a couple Nokia models no bigger than a Snickers bar.
They worked pretty damn well, and soon more than just salesmen, construction guys, and rich people could justify buying one, as it became clear how much more productive people could be.
We used to say the phones wouldn’t get much smaller than a candy bar, because the distance between your mouth and ear is at least 3-4 inches, but, we did think that perhaps the Dick Tracy cartoons of a wrist watch phone might one day become a reality.
Then Blackberry’s came out, with a full QWERTY keypad, and this was copied by other Mfrs., so the need for beepers was heading to its sunset days.
Beepers were for people who had to keep in touch, but couldn’t be afforded a handheld cell phone. The high end beepers actually had qwerty keypads, and were the forerunners of the modern texting phenomena that’s now incorporated to all handheld cell phones.
I dropped out of the cell phone game in ’93, when T-Mobile, Sprint, and other carriers were allowed to compete even further with the original 2 major carriers in each region.
My primary role in that industry was installation of units into vehicles, so my job became obsolete with the advance of handheld phones.
What I didn’t see coming was the coordination of so many different abilities being crammed into today’s smart phones.

We’ve come a long, long way in 35 years with cell technology, and many others.
Interesting stuff to some, but possibly boring as hell to others.

In any event, something HSF posted triggered a good reaction. Imagine that.