Belen Molleda |
Madrid (EFE).- Half a century after the American engineer Martin Cooper invented the mobile phone, this device has become one of the great revolutions of humanity, even above the landline, and is used by more than 68 % of the population.
An average of five hours a day is used and, assuming that a person sleeps an average of between 7 and 8 hours per day, the figures indicate that users spend 30% of their lives awake using the mobile, according to the Summary Report global digital 2023, produced by Datareportal in collaboration with Meltwater and We Are Social.
This Monday, April 3, marks the 50th anniversary of that call Cooper made to Joel Engel, a competition investigator. Cooper picked up a Motorola DynaTac 8000X to tell him, “Joel, I’m calling from a cell phone. From a real one.” Silence was the response he got.
It was a device weighing almost one kilogram, which took 10 hours to charge and barely 30 minutes of autonomy.
That invention has led to the smartphones or “smartphones” that are used today and that already work with 5G technology, a generation that is already on its way to the G.
There was nothing to presage that that mobile call could lead to all the functionalities that the mobile was going to have today.
Its inventor, Cooper (Chicago, 1928) recently recalled in an interview with EFE that when he proceeded to make this call to Engel, a researcher at Bell Laboratories, he did not imagine that in the future digital cameras or the Internet would be incorporated into these devices. .
However, Cooper did predict that everyone would have a mobile.
That mobile phone has derived half a century later into sophisticated smartphones, devices that have the necessary power to be used as computers. Foldable, without folding, extendable, light or heavy, the range of devices is abundant. 92.3% of mobile phones have Internet access.
A revolution of 5.440 million users
This invention has become one of the “great revolutions of humanity due to the change it has introduced in our lives, even beyond the landline telephone,” the president of the Association of Computer Engineers, Fernando Suárez, explained to EFE.
If it took the conventional telephone almost 65 years to reach 100 million users, the mobile phone has not taken fifty years to exceed 6,000 million, recalls Suárez.
Its use is increasing year by year, and, according to the Digital Global Summary Report 2023, a total of 5.440 million people use it.
Unique mobile users increased just over 3% over the past year, with 168 million new users in the last 12 months.
The average usage rate is also growing. Seven minutes more on average in 2022 compared to 2021.
The average five hours of usage comes from a data.ai analysis, which is based on a selection of the largest markets. If usage were the same for all markets, that would mean combined mobile usage would be 10 trillion hours per year.