Jitterbug Phone Reviews – CNN interviews Jitterbug inventor
CNN recently interviewed the founder of Jitterbug, Martin Cooper. In his interview with CNN, Cooper discussed his invention and voiced his dissatisfaction over the trend of phones becoming over-complicated.
Cooper spearheaded Motorola’s efforts to produce a commercially-viable mobile device in 1973 to compete with AT&T’s efforts to produce a viable car phone; essentially, if one person can be credited with inventing the cellular phone, it is Martin Cooper. Interestingly enough, the first official call that Cooper made on his cell phone was to Joel S. Engel at AT&T.
As Cooper describes in the interview, mobile technology has come a long way. Motorola’s original cell phones, named the DynaTac, were about 11 inches long and 4 inches deep; they cost $3,900 when they first hit the market in 1983. Phones have since shrunk in size and cost, but Cooper questions the direction that the market has taken in developing smart phones.
Martin Cooper is not opposed to smart phones; in fact, he is much happier with the Motorola Droid than he was with the iPhone. But Cooper hoped that mobile companies would expand beyond smart phones into an array of custom interfaces and service plans. As it stands, there are very few companies like Jitterbug and Just5 that offer simple experiences for users who want only the basic functions of the mobile phone, paramount of which are calling and receiving calls.
According to the CNN interview, Cooper uses three phones: the Motorola Droid, the Vertu (a $5,000 European phone), and the Jitterbug J. He hopes that the market will, like he did, keep the needs of different customers in mind as they branch away from the smart phone.
