'Gadgets' don't impress cell phone father
By Dan Gillmor
Knight Ridder News Service
Even in 1973, New Yorkers had a reputation for taking things in stride. But when Martin Cooper emerged from a Hilton Hotel 30 years ago to make the first calls with a portable cellular phone, he drew a crowd of gawkers.
Today, the only gawking would be directed at the Motorola prototype he used, a brick-sized device that weighed 30 ounces. Today, we do more than talk with our phones; we keep track of people and appointments, take photos and browse the Web. Today, Cooper heads a Silicon Valley company that sells technology for high-speed wireless data connections.
The first commercial cellular service didn't start for another decade after Cooper's pathbreaking calls. But there's no doubt that Cooper, then a Motorola vice president and now widely acknowledged as the father of the modern cell phone, launched a revolution that keeps accelerating. And he's still challenging the established wisdom.
The challenge in 1973 was to the telecommunications monopoly. AT&T was selling car phones, Cooper recalls, but wasn't planning to introduce true portables for years to come. Motorola had developed technology to shrink the heavy car-phone gear down to a hand-held size, and the company needed to show that it worked.
The demonstration in New York made news all over the world.
At the recent Cellular Telecommunications Internet Association trade show in New Orleans, Cooper criticized the industry as "focused on gimmicks and gadgets and has forgotten the customer."
"I thought people wanted, first of all, a reliable call," he says.
Service innovations aren't entirely useless. Younger users have tended to show the phone companies the most interesting new ways to use the services, such as text messaging.
Yet, Cooper argues that many carriers still exhibit the monopolistic attitudes of legacy telecom companies. They control networks and service. This holds back the innovation as well as a focus on basics, he says.
ArrayComm, the San Jose, Calif., company where Cooper is chairman and chief executive, has developed "smart radio" base stations that constantly calculate the location of mobile devices. He hopes his company's focus on voice will address problems associated with broadband data access. With a technology called i-Burst, he says, mobile carriers could provide high-speed data connections comparable to cable and digital subscriber line competitors at a lower price as well as mobile capabilities.
