The march of progress goes on unrelenting. As the gadgets we take for granted shrink and merge with others, new markets appear and die all the time, with new classifications of products born seemingly every day.


But is this right? Martin Cooper, widely referred to as the inventor of the mobile phone, has said at a privacy conference in Madrid this week that modern mobile phones are ‘too complicated.’


It’s not Mr Cooper’s first such outburst; the 80-year old ex-motorola employee has previously lambasted the iPhone as being overly complex and hard to use.


- A brief history of tech


He said at this week’s conference: “Whenever you create a universal device that does all things for all people, it does not do any things well.” His solution? More dedicated gadgets. “Our future I think is a number of specialist devices that focus on one thing that will improve our lives,” he continued.


Essentially the only thing Cooper was in favour of was the pocketable size of today’s phones: “The first cell phone model weighed over one kilo,” he said, “and you could only talk for 20 minutes before the battery ran out, which is just as well because you would not be able to hold it up for much longer.”


Mr Cooper made the world’s first mobile, wireless call in Manhattan on the 3rd of April 1973.


Link: Telegraph