Quick hits: April 2023

A narrow and long rectangular shape, anything but manageable, little autonomy in calls and moreover expensive: this is how Motorola’s DynaTac 8000x presented itself, the first mobile phone to debut in stores.

It was March 6, 1983 and the commercial era of the mobile phone began, an object that changed our lives. Motorola had already taken up the new challenge ten years earlier: it was in fact April 1973 when engineer Martin Cooper had managed to make the first experimental wireless call on the street.

Approximately 25 centimeters tall and weighing 800 grams, the DynaTAC 8000x’s shape looked more like a walkie-talkie than a portable telephone.

It allowed for half an hour of phone calls, could store 30 phone numbers and cost nearly $4,000, a price that makes today’s high-end smartphones appear Meta is creating a new working group to bring generative Artificial Intelligence - which creates text and images - to its products such as Instagram and WhatsApp and thus create ‘pleasant experiences’.