Cell phones
Cell phones are not as new a technology as you might think. They were introduced in the early 1980s, though they were quite large and heavy, and cost thousands of dollars. In 1989, Motorola introduced the first easily portable cell phone, the Motorola MicroTAC, which could fit in a pocket.
Owners enjoyed its relatively long battery life of about 75 minutes – but they had to cough up a lot for the device, as it listed at $2,995.
Today you can get many terrific smartphones for several hundred dollars or less. A new model that’s close to top of the line from Apple or Samsung can be had for $1,000 or less. It might not seem the greatest discount, to go from $3,000 to $1,000 for a phone over 30 years, but remember that the 1989 phone was pretty much just that – it was for phone calls.
Today’s phones, of course, can do gobs of other things, such as play music, take photographs, transmit email, run millions of apps, give directions, take orders, and access the internet.
