There were no digital cameras, no personal computers, and certainly no Internet in 1973. 
 
 But there were cell phones. Well, one anyway. 
 
 On April 3, 1973, from a Manhattan street corner -- 6th Ave. between 53rd and 54th -- Motorola’s Martin Cooper placed the world’s first mobile phone call. To his rival, no less. 
 
 “I was running the whole Motorola cellular program, I was a division manager at that time, and he was the AT&T equivalent,” Cooper told tech site the Verge last year, on the 39th anniversary of that phone call. “I have to tell you, to this day, he resents what Motorola did in those days.” 
 
 Cooper called Joel Engel from Bell Systems to tell him that the race to perfect cellular tech was over -- Motorola had done it first. Cooper's exact words on that call weren’t recorded the way Samuel Morse’s first telegraph message was (“what hath god wrought”) or Alexander Graham Bell’s first phone call (“Watson, come here. I want to see you”). He reportedly said something like, "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end." 
 
 The gadget he used is well known, however. 
 
 The prototype version that would become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x weighed 2.5 pounds, had a single-line, text-only LED screen. It would take a decade before Motorola’s DynaTAC finally reached consumer hands. 
 
 On September 21, 1983, Motorola made history when the FCC approved the 8000X, the world's first commercial portable cell phone. It cost consumers a whopping $3,995 at the time. 
 
 And the hunk of cream-colored plastic and wires Cooper used looks preposterous next to the sleek modern iPhones and Androids today’s consumers rely upon, of course. 
 
 Even Cooper has moved on: today he relies on a Motorola RAZR -- or at least he did last year, he told The Verge. Cooper remains a pioneer in cell phones; he told the site he gets a new one every six months. 
 
 “I'm being sorely tested lately because the phones are coming out so fast. Each time they get a little better, and I think they're pretty much on a par now — if you know how to use them — with the iPhone,” he told The Verge. ||||| The first mobile phone call was made 40 years today, on April 3, 1973, by Motorola employee Martin Cooper. Using a prototype of what would become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, the world’s first commercial cell phone, Cooper stood near a 900 MHz base station on Sixth Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets, in New York City and placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey. 
 
 The substance of the call is lost to history, but it probably doesn’t compare to the first telegram (“What hath God wrought”), first telephone call (“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you”), or even the first text message (“Merry Christmas”). Cooper’s inaugural mobile conversation is remembered as, “I’m ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end,’ or something to that effect.” 
 
 Regardless, the call was a major step in the development of mobile technology, though it would take another decade for the DynaTAC to reach consumers and two more decades for cell phones to overtake land lines in worldwide usage. But today, “phone” is synonymous with “mobile phone,” and the latest trend is toward mobile devices that aren’t really phones much at all. Motorola’s mobile business, meanwhile, is now owned by Google. 
 
 Here’s a look at the evolution of mobile devices from the first commercially available DynaTAC to the smartphones of today: ||||| Mobile phone technology has come a long way since the first mobile phone call was made 40 years ago – but there is a lot more innovation ahead, according to one expert. 
 
 It was on 3 April 1973 that Motorola employee Martin Cooper made a call in New York on a Motorola DynaTAC – dubbed a "brick" due to its size and weight – which was widely regarded globally as the first public mobile phone call. 
 
 The device was 9 inches tall, comprised 30 circuit boards, had a talk-time of 35 minutes, and took 10 hours to recharge. 
 
 Four decades on, a worldwide telecoms industry with annual revenues of £800bn has grown rapidly based on wide choice, falling prices and an array of technologies, resulting in the average mobile being used to take photos, play music and games, send emails, download maps, watch video clips, all as well as talking and texting. 
 
 Mike Short, an expert from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said Cooper's phone call is the first public call people recognise as being a cellular mobile call. 
 
 He said the 10 years following that first call were "very much developmental", with research being carried out in laboratories before services were launched in 1981 in the US. 
 
 "Since its first use 40 years ago, the mobile phone has completely changed our lives. The first decade was a research or a 'demonstrator' phase, rapidly followed by analogue networks deployed over 10 years from the early 1980s largely based on carphones and used in business in the developed world. 
 
 "This soon led to the digital decade mainly between 1993 and 2003 when consumerisation and globalisation of mobile really took off. 
 
 "This led to a further data adoption phase with the arrival of 3G and during 2003 to 2013 access to the internet and the wider use of smartphones became a reality," he said. 
 
 The two most significant developments in mobile phone technology have been the widespread availability of devices and their ability to access the internet, Short said. 
 
 "In the early days of mobile, consumerisation was not considered. It was made for men in suits in business, whereas consumerisation followed much later. 
 
 "And then access to the internet followed much later again. The first smartphones weren't until about five years ago. So the pace of change has actually sped up over the 40 years, particularly in the past 15 to 18 years," he said. 
 
 Short expects mobile technology to continue to evolve and said people can expect even more developments in future. 
 
 "More changes are expected. The early days of mobile were all about voice, whereas today it's much more about data. 
 
 "And the point about data is that we can carry voice calls over the data channel, but in future we'll move towards fuller data services such as video – much more video to video calling, much more screens on the wall in your home, maybe more video television downloaded, catchup TV, that sort of thing. 
 
 "So there's a lot more innovation to come, particularly in the data and video worlds," he said. 
 
 Mobile phone users will have noticed these changes in the last few years, as phones have become more affordable and sit lightly in the palm of their hand – but innovators are working to enhance these aspects of modern devices further. 
 
 Short said: "The cost has already fallen a long way. What tends to happen is you get more functionality per pound spent. 
 
 "That would include more memory, that would include more features, that would include more capability to access the internet at higher speeds. 
 
 "The weight has dropped dramatically already, but we're seeing, probably this year, the first watch-based phones." 
 
 With improvements and changes implemented so frequently, Dr Short said it is hard to know what exactly to expect in the next 40 years, but it is safe to assume millions more people in the world will have access to mobile phones. 
 
 "It's very difficult to predict 40 years' time because the pace of innovation is speeding up. I would say that we'll all be mobile, globally, everyone will be mobile. 
 
 "I'd also say that we'll be connecting many more machines via wireless mobile technology as well. 
 
 "The world of around 7bn devices connected today should be in excess of 70bn connected devices in 40 years' time," he said. ||||| “We’re excited about the smartphone business,” said Mr. Woodside, who previously led Google’s sales and operations for the Americas. “The Google business is built on a wired model, and as the world moves to a pretty much completely wireless model over time, it’s really going to be important for Google to understand everything about the mobile consumer.” 
 
 But some analysts wonder whether Google can succeed in the brutally competitive, low-margin cellphone business. 
 
 “Ninety percent of the profits in the smartphone space are going to Apple and Samsung, and everyone else from Motorola to RIM to LG to Nokia are picking up the scraps of that 10 percent,” said Charlie Kindel, a former manager at Microsoft who writes about the mobile industry. “There’s no real sign that’s changing anytime soon.” 
 
 It was not always this way. Motorola executives like to talk about its glory days. The company, started in 1928 in Chicago, unveiled the first commercial cellphone in 1973. By 2004, it looked as if Motorola could again lead the cellphone industry when it introduced the popular Razr. 
 
 But Apple and Samsung won consumers’ hearts with the more exciting iPhone and Galaxy phones. Motorola Mobility — which split last year from Motorola Solutions, the division that makes devices like police radios — lost $233 million in its first six weeks under Google. The phone business has been unprofitable for 14 of the last 16 quarters. 
 
 “It got left in the dust by the competition and kind of missed the smartphone transition,” said Charles S. Golvin, a mobile analyst at Forrester Research. 
 
 In addition to the coming cuts, Google has gutted Motorola management, letting go 40 percent of its vice presidents. It also hired new senior executives. It will shrink operations in Asia and India, and center research and development in Chicago, Sunnyvale and Beijing. 
 
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 Mr. Woodside also plans to cut the number of devices Motorola makes from the 27 it introduced last year to just a few. He wants to make the company’s products cool again by loading them with things like sensors that recognize who is in a room based on their voices, cameras that take crisper photos and batteries that last for days. 
 
 Many of these new ideas will come from a group of just a few dozen people within the company that has the unassuming name of Advanced Technology and Projects. 
 
 Photo 
 
 To foster innovation, Google created the group to drop a Silicon Valley-style start-up into a lumbering Midwestern company and recruited Regina Dugan from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to run it. 
 
 Ms. Dugan, though coming from Washington, already speaks the language of Silicon Valley. “It’s a small, lean and agile group that is unafraid of failure,” she said, and it will “celebrate impatience.” 
 
 She is hiring metal scientists, acoustics engineers and artificial intelligence experts. They will work for her for only two years so they feel a sense of urgency, she said, an idea she borrowed from Darpa, where people wear their resignation date on their name tags. 
 
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 Motorola has been spending too much money on too many different cellphone components, said Mark Randall, whom Google recruited to run Motorola’s supply chain from Amazon.com, where he did that for the Kindle. He said he planned to jettison suppliers and buy 50 percent fewer components. 
 
 How to get people excited about Motorola phones when shiny iPhones are on the next shelf? 
 
 Gary Briggs, who ran consumer marketing at Google and now does so at Motorola, is working on advertisements that he said would be more like Google’s — simple and emotional. They will focus on Motorola’s storied past and the ways the products are better than the competition’s, like battery life. 
 
 “We have a right to compete in this market,” Mr. Briggs said, “and I think we’ve got to prove why we’re going to build and bring devices to people that are worth talking about again.” 
 
 Competitors like Sony, LG and HTC will be watching closely to see how the Motorola-Google relationship develops, especially whether Motorola receives special treatment from Google. Like Motorola, they use the Android mobile operating system, for which Google receives no payment. 
 
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 “They certainly don’t believe Google’s going to keep a Chinese wall in place,” Mr. Kindel, the former Microsoft manager, said of the other cellphone makers. “The reality is people work together, they can pick up the phones and talk. There is going to be an advantage.” 
 
 There is, for instance, a program for Google software engineers to work at Motorola for a year or two. 
 
 But Mr. Woodside said Google benefited from many manufacturers’ using Android, and repeated Google’s promise that Motorola would have no advantages. He said Motorola would also compete equally with others to build Google-branded Nexus devices, which Google makes with a hardware partner when it introduces new versions of Android. 
 
 A Motorola Mobility executive who recently left the company and would speak only on the condition of anonymity because he was uncomfortable talking to the news media, said that if anything, it had become more difficult than before for Motorola to have impromptu collaboration with the Android team. 
 
 But still, because of the relationship, Motorola could get priority on Google products, like a mobile version of desktop software. 
 
 And, people familiar with the companies say, Google could decide to follow Apple’s lead and build a phone from silicon to software, perhaps by creating a separate operating system for Motorola that other phone makers cannot use. 
 
 Google and Motorola seem to have a mutually beneficial marriage of hardware and software, Mr. Golvin said. Motorola needs software smarts and Google, which has struggled with Chrome laptops, Google TV and most recently the Nexus Q, needs help with hardware. Motorola’s set-top boxes, which it sells to cable operators, could also help Google make the leap to TV screens, if it does not sell that business. 
 
 In the meantime, Motorola’s cellphone expertise has already been useful. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, called to see whether the sky divers he had hired to perform at a recent conference could get cell reception a mile in the sky. ||||| Mobile phones: 40 years of handsets in pictures 
 
 As we reach the 40th anniversary of the first public mobile phone call, we look back at four decades of innovation, from the 'brick' handsets of the 1970s and 1980s to today's smartphones. Expert Mike Short says: 'Since its first use 40 years ago, the mobile phone has completely changed our lives. The first decade was a research or a 'demonstrator' phase, rapidly followed by analogue networks deployed over 10 years from the early 1980s largely based on carphones and used in business in the developed world. This soon led to the digital decade mainly between 1993 and 2003 when consumerisation and globalisation of mobile really took off. This led to a further data adoption phase with the arrival of 3G and during 2003 to 2013 access to the internet and the wider use of smartphones became a reality'
– Give someone a call on your smartphone today, and you'll be celebrating history: It's been 40 years since the first mobile phone call was made, the Guardian reports. That first call was placed by Motorola worker Martin Cooper in New York City on April 3, 1973, using a so-called "brick" of a phone: the Motorola DynaTAC. Some nine inches tall, the DynaTac let you talk for 35 minutes using its 30 circuit boards. It took 10 hours to recharge. It's not exactly known what Cooper said during that conversation in midtown Manhattan, but it was something like, "I’m ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end," Quartz reports. Who did Cooper call? His rival, he told the Verge in an interview last year: Bell Labs' Joel Engel. The next decade was largely devoted to research; the first cell phone for commercial use got the FCC's OK on Sept. 21, 1983—the Motorola 8000x, which sold for $3,995, reports Fox News. The Guardian has photos of the history of mobile phones.