Holding the large and heavy "brick" cellphone he's credited with inventing 50 years ago, Martin Cooper talks about the future.
Little did he know when he made the first call on a New York City street from a heavy Motorola prototype(原型) that our world would come to be encapsulated on a sleek glass sheath where we search, connect, like and buy.
Cooper says he is an optimist. He believes that advances in mobile technology will continue to transform lives but he is worried about risks smartphones pose to privacy and young people.
"My most negative opinion is we don't have any privacy anymore because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it," the 94-year-old said in an interview in Barcelona at MWC, the Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest wireless trade show, where he was getting a lifetime award.
Cooper sees a dark side to the advances, including the risk to children. One idea, he said, is to have "various Internets intended for different audiences."
Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a Manhattan street on April 3,1973, using a prototype device his team at Motorola had started designing just five months earlier.
Cooper used the Dyna-TAC phone to famously call his opponent at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T. It was literally the world's first brick phone, weighing 2.5 pounds and measuring 11 inches.
Cooper spent the best part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market.
The call helped kick-start the cellphone revolution (革命).
Cooper said he's "not crazy" about the shape of modern smartphones. He thinks they will develop so that they'll be "distributed on your body," possibly as sensors "measuring your health at all times."
Batteries, he said, might be replaced by human energy. The body makes energy from food, he argues, so it could possibly also power a phone. Instead of holding the phone in the hand, for example, the device could be placed under the skin.