Pioneering cellphone engineer wants to see phones disassembled
Martin Cooper was a Motorola engineer in 1973 when he demonstrated the first handheld cellphone. Now 85, he is less than enthusiastic about the newest phones becoming almost as large as his original brick-sized device, according to Don Clark writing in the Wall Street Journal.
The latest phones, Cooper says, are designed by engineers for tech enthusiasts and are not for everyone—particularly older people. In fact, he founded the company that makes the Jitterbug phone, which emphasizes ease of use and medical-alert functionality in place of typical smartphone features.
Cooper says anthropologists, not just engineers, should be in charge of product evolution, and it’s wrong to think one phone design is the only solution for everybody. He wants to see more competition among handset makers and less control by carriers.
Rather than a continuing trend toward larger phones, Cooper wants to see the smartphone disassembled into sensors and wearables distributed across the body. What we think of as the phone today will become a server that you keep in your pocket and rarely have to take out.
He also foresees activity trackers and vital-sign sensors linked with genetic data sources. IBM took a step in that direction earlier this week when it announced in conjunction with Pathway Genomics an initiative to enable its cloud-based Watson technology to provide genetic information through a consumer-facing mobile app.
Read the complete interview with Cooper here.
