Russian Head of State, Mikhail Gorbachev was handed one to receive a call in 1989, a marketing coup for Finnish firm Nokia.
NEC launched the NEC 9A handheld mobile phone in the UK in Autumn 1987. The genius of the cell phone idea was that you could break up a city into many small cells. Long distance and roaming are usually free -- something that definitely wasn't the case in the 80s. That's how rare car radio phones were at that time. Instead of one tower with four channels serving a 40-mile radius, you could have dozens of cells in a city with 50 callers in each cell. Earlier phones by Motorola were more conservative. The car phone had to be permanently installed in the console of the car, using a large battery pack that the hand piece was attached to with a cord. This was the world's first flip phone, a precursor of the modern clamshell. A mobile phone is essentially a phone that uses radio waves rather than wires. A MORI survey from 1988 confirmed that over half of mobile phone users were happy to make calls whilst driving and only 12 percent were prepared to ignore incoming calls, even when driving at high speed.The original mobile phones from the 80s were referred to as bricks, because they were as big as a house brick. Mobile phones were still mainly a business tool, but those further down the corporate pay scale were now able to get their hands on one. In the early 1980s, if you were talking to a person with a car phone, a bag phone or an actual handheld "brick" cell phone, you knew you were talking to an "important person."I can remember driving with a realtor in the early 1980s. 80s Cell Phones. Initially the NEC 9A was relatively expensive. 80s Cell Phone, Looking back at the Cell Phones in the 1980s, Types of Cell Phones That were available in the 80s.
In 1986 they added the BT Pearl which was made by Mitsubishi then later the Coral by Kokusai and the Ivory, also made by a Japanese manufacturer.There are also modern retro style phones available that work on the GSM system. It was the last true brick phone made and the only one to work on GSM. It was also the first cell phone approved by the FCC and small enough to be portable.The bag phone was a slightly smaller, more portable version of the car phone. The Nokia Cityman was truly a phone for the 80s, a time obsessed with style and image.Nokia first entered the cell phone market with a radio phone called the Mobira Senator. However, it's great to own a piece of history.In the 80s, pundits thought mobile phones would get smaller.