It’s been 50 years since the very first mobile phone call on April 3, 1973. On that momentous day, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper rang his rival, Dr Joel Engel of Bell Laboratories at AT&T, from a street in New York to declare that his Motorola team had devised a functional portable phone.
Since then, the mobile phone has become ubiquitous. The number of smartphone mobile network subscriptions worldwide reached almost 6.4 billion in 2022, or almost one for every man, woman and child on the planet, according to Statista.
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