Yes, this blog is about smartphones and PDAs. But who says we can't track their origins? Like the history of the cell phone. More specifically, the first cell phone and its inventor.

According to ZDNet UK's interview of Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first cell phone, we just missed the 34th anniversary of the first-ever mobile call (April 3):

Q: You made the first cellphone call. What happened?
A: Here we are on, out on the streets of New York, surrounded by these blasé New Yorkers gawking at us because they've never seen somebody standing on the street dialing a phone number with one of these. I decided this was a great opportunity to needle my counterpart at Bell Laboratories. I would not suggest he was a friendly competitor, but we had been speaking. I called him and said, 'Joe, I'm calling you from a real portable cellular telephone.' I thought I heard gnashing of teeth in the background, but he was polite. And we had a chat for a while.

Looks like ruthless competition already existed even during the earliest years of the mobile industry. Cooper was working for Motorola when he made history.

It's obvious that we've come a long way in terms of price, performance, and features. The world's first cellphone, the Motorola Dyna-Tac, weighed 2.5 pounds, had no screen, lasted for only 35 minutes, and needed 10 hours of charging to fill the battery. Oh, and it could only "talk, listen, and dial." Take that, you GPS-capable and HSDPA-ready Nokia E90!

Martin Cooper, who's turning 79 the day after Christmas, still had a good grasp of wireless technologies when he gave the interview back in 2003:

What's the next big step for the cellphone?
The carriers are now using this modern technology called cellular. But wait a second, it was invented in 1945 and implemented in 1983. We're ready for the next generation, which I think are smart antennas. With that, you don't need nearly as much spectrum. It literally multiplies the spectrum by many times.

Thanks to the growing popularity of HSDPA, WiMax, and all those other wireless protocols that promise extreme transfer rates, sounds like he was right on the money. Modern wireless technologies do get more out of less by tweaking radio waves for maximum performance.

So, you know who to blame for connectivity addiction, driving dangerously, and all the other badness associated with wireless living. But you also know who to thank for the mobile web, easy messaging, and of course, the existence of The Smart PDA.