Happy 40th Birthday to the Cellphone

This month, we celebrate the 40th birthday of the cellphone. It was on April 3rd, 1973, when Motorola Engineer Martin Cooper placed the first call from a cellular telephone.

To say that “much has changed in four decades” is an understatement. Then, it was a technological triumph to make a phone call, untethered, from a device that weighed so much that it came with its own suitcase. Fast forward 40 years, and we now have our choice when it comes to a wide range of seemingly weightless smartphones that not only put power of a super computer into the palm of our hands, but give us a choice of four operating systems – Windows, Apple, Android or BlackBerry.

Outfitted with thousands of apps to help us become more efficient, knowledgeable, and updated on just about whatever interests us most at the time, the cellphone we first came to know back in April of ’73 seems like a very distant memory. And, today our choices are no longer limited to cellphones or smartphones, with tablets
and other devices that provide us with seamless connectivity to the Internet.

This new category of connected devices, or what some call the “Internet of
Things,” is the next wave in mobile technology. At the end of 2012, Samsung
introduced the world’s first connected camera, the Samsung Galaxy Camera,
powered by the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network. With a super-fast, embedded 4G
LTE connection, you can upload high quality, large MB photos and HD videos you
take on the device directly to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram
and YouTube.

The genius of this device is that it eliminates the “wait” involved in plugging your camera into your computer or removing its memory card to transfer and send your photos. You can immediately share, as you shoot, high-quality photos like a pro.

Connected devices, like new digital cameras, are a new and growing trend, and represent the future of wireless, a future where we’ll have access to a whole host of connected devices and services that can help us track our fitness goals, manage our home automation, diagnose problems with our cars, measure the intensity of a football player’s hits through a helmet equipped with wireless sensors, and improve factory performance. Having a device that connects to the Internet over a robust 4G LTE network is essential for making life more convenient, safe and efficient.

So here’s to innovation and the next 40 years.