First generation

On April 3, 1973, Motorola employee Dr. Martin Cooper placed a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of research at AT&T's Bell Labs, while walking the streets of New York City talking on the first Motorola DynaTAC prototype in front of reporters. Motorola has a long history of making automotive radio, especially two-way radios for taxicabs and police cruisers.

In 1978, Bell Labs launched a trial of the first commercial cellular network in Chicago using AMPS [1], but this network was not approved by the FCC until 1982.

The first commercial launch of cellular telecoms was launched by NET in Tokyo Japan in 1979. In 1981 the NMT system was launched in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

The first handheld mobile phone in the US market was the Motorola Dyna 8000X, which received approval in 1983.

Mobile phones began to proliferate through the 1980s with the introduction of "cellular" phones based on cellular networks with multiple base stations located relatively close to each other, and protocols for the automated "handover" between two cells when a phone moved from one cell to the other. At this time analog transmission was in use in all systems. Mobile phones were somewhat larger than current ones, and at first, all were designed for permanent installation in vehicles (hence the term car phone). Soon, some of these bulky units were converted for use as "transportable" phones the size of a briefcase. Motorola introduced the first truly portable, hand held phone. These systems (NMT, AMPS, TACS, RTMI, C-Net, and Radiocom 2000) later became known as first generation (1G) mobile phones