The cellphone at 25: Like a digital Swiss army knife that enables talk

MONTREAL - Slim, sleek and doing more than ever, the cellphone isn't showing its age after a quarter of a century.

Now 25 years old, the cellphone has changed communication, where and when it's done and also what people do with the mobile device.

"Up until we all had cellphones if you wanted to talk with someone you almost always, with a couple of exceptions, had to be in a specific place," said PC Magazine analyst Sascha Segan.

"You had to wait by the phone. Now voice communication is completely unhinged from place. Anyone can be talking to someone else wherever these two people are," said Segan, lead analyst for mobile devices with the U.S.-based technology publication.

Back in the fall of 1983, Motorola introduced the first commercial cellphone in the United States called the DynaTAC, priced at about $4,000 and weighing in at the equivalent of two pounds of butter. The phone became available to consumers a year later.

In the early years cellphones were thick, clunky and big enough that some of them even fit into small carrying cases.

"It was basically a voice communications device and not a very good one at that when it first came out," said Technology analyst Jack Gold, who joked the early cellphone as "about the size of your car almost."

"You can get a phone that's now smaller than a deck of cards," said Gold of J. Gold Associates in Northborough, Mass.

The emergence of the Internet as part of people's daily lives and digital technology happened around the same time a decade ago and that helped change the use of cellphones, he said.

The United Nations telecoms agency said earlier this year that the number of mobile phone users will overtake the number of non-users this year for the first time.

Segan added that in the second half of the 1990s, the smaller size of cellphones, prices, digital networks and their geographic helped make them into a device with widespread use.

"At which point, they totally transformed human communication in a way that nothing in thousands of years has done."

These days, while cellphones are still primarily for talking they're also like a digital Swiss Army knife, giving users access to the Internet, email, music, movies and features like cameras and GPS tracking and can be had for less than $100.

IDC senior research analyst Ramon Llamas said many of the functions on cellphones like music, screen colours and ring tones, can be personalized, making the mobile device unique to an individual.

"This is the great phenomenon of consumer electronics, it's all about you and how you want it to be and the mobile phone is really no different than that," said Llamas, who's based in the Boston area with the global market intelligence firm.

"We are in this great era of convergence."

He described the cellphone as an item people wouldn't leave home without.

"You never leave your house without your keys and your wallet and now it's your mobile phone, too."

IDC said about 300 million cellphones were shipped between April and June of this year without about 10 per cent of those phones being smartphones, which include BlackBerrys and iPhones that have Internet access, email and are able to run applications that allow such things as live stock quotes and social networking.

Segan said the next evolution will be growth in smartphones.

"Just as people want to talk wherever they are, people want to know things wherever they are. The next step is putting that sum of all human knowledge everywhere you are."

While cellphones have positive attributes, Llamas said there is a downside.

"How much more can you put into your phone. More important than that is how do you get people to use these features?"

There's also the question of manners when using a cellphone, he said, adding there are times and places when people should shut them off.