The scale and prevalence of mobile phones in today's age is extraordinary when you think that little more than 40 years ago, not one person was able to buy one commercially. That all changed on March 13 1984, when the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X became the first mobile phone to be sold in the US Midwest and East coast, more than a year after it was first revealed.
Now, millions of mobile phones – that we largely call smartphones – are sold every day. Smartphone sales reached an annual peak of more than 1,556 million units in 2018, before slumping ever so slightly over the COVID-19 years, and remaining at roughly 1,339 million units in 2023, according to Statista. Phones sold today, however, are a far cry from the cumbersome, oversized and blocky Motorola handset that was first sold 40 years ago.
