When I go skiing, I may carry a phone, but it's there for safety purposes. I'm not one of these guys that reads his email while he's riding up on the chair lift.
— Martin Cooper
I do like to get away from technology. I still read a lot. Having said that, most of my reading is on computers or a Kindle or an iPad.
Just think of what a world it would be if we could measure the characteristics of your body when you get sick and transmit those directly to a doctor or a computer. You could get diagnosed and cured instantly and wirelessly.
The notion that there's finite spectrum is mostly wrong.
The first cellular systems didn't become commercially available until 1983. Most of the phones before then were in fact car phones.
The technology that lets many people use the same radio channel at the same time is called smart antenna technology or adaptive array technology or interference mitigation. This technology uses computer processors to take the signals from multiple antennas at each location and sorts the various signals out so they don't interfere with each other.
Good technology is intuitive - the cellphone forces you to become an engineer.
I never really started to carry a cellular phone until it was small enough so I could put it on my belt and not even feel it was there.
Wireless is freedom. It's about being unleashed from the telephone cord and having the ability to be virtually anywhere when you want to be.
Just suppose that you could do a physical examination, not every year, which people do and which is almost worthless, but every minute, because you're connected, and because we have devices that you can put on your body that measure virtually everything on your body.
The optimum telephone is one that I think some day is gonna be embedded behind your ear. It's gonna have an extraordinarily powerful computer running the cell phone.
I got a Motorola Droid that I use. I also have a Jitterbug.
I'm always trying whatever the latest telephone is.
There are all kinds of features that will become part of cell phones that will help us offload the more laborious things of life and let us focus on doing the things humans do well, like abstract thinking and creating.
The biggest innovation of all is social networking, and cellular technology is the facilitator for social networking. People are mobile; social networking is people, and the only way people connect with each other is wirelessly.
Our dream was that someday nobody would talk on a wired telephone. Everybody would talk on a wireless phone.
There is no reason why T-Mobile can't be successful on its own and the only real reason AT&T would want to own T-Mobile is to increase its exclusivity by owning more spectrum.
The more we learn about new communications, the more capacity we need, and that is going to keep going on forever. That's been happening since radio was invented, and that's going to keep going.
The future of cellular telephony is to make people's lives better - the most important way, in my view, will be the opportunity to revolutionise healthcare.
We had no idea that things like Facebook and Twitter, and all these other concepts, would ever happen.
What else is there in life but to accomplish things and to do things? Sure I like to be on a beach on occasion, I like to ski on occasion, but as long as I have the ability to make a contribution, I am going to keep going.
I think what is going to happen in the future is more customization, more personalization. We all are different and we ought to be able to customize and have a phone that does exactly what we want it to do - that is so easy to use that we don't even have to think about it. That's what the dream is.
I only live for the future.
Technology has to be invisible. Transparent. Just simple.
I had an iPhone for a while, I gave that to my grandson. Kids are really caught up in that.
Just remember, in 1973, we had no digital cameras, no personal computers, no Internet. The thought of putting a billion transistors in a cell phone was ludicrous.
People thought I was crazy thinking about a phone you can just put in your pocket.
Cellular was the forerunner to true wireless communications.
Bell Labs was a fantastic research organization but having them create and market new products for the world was terrible. They were not good marketers and yet it was AT&T engineers who were deciding what the products of the future were.
People are mobile. They move around, and anytime they want to communicate, if you tie them to the wall or the wires, you're restricting them, you're infringing on their freedom.
You have to immerse yourself into a product and use it in order to really understand it and that's why I have a new cellphone every month or two.
As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones.
It pleases me no end to have had some small impact on people's lives because these phones do make people's lives better. They promote productivity, they make people more comfortable, they make them feel safe and all of those things.
If we don't blow ourselves up, this is going to be a really wonderful world.
Privacy is a thing of the past.
I don't want to be the oldest anything in America. Sorry about that.
I think what's really going to happen is we're going to have a lot of different kinds of phones when our industry grows up - some that are just plain, simple telephones. In fact, my wife and I started a company, and she designed the Jitterbug, which is just a simple telephone.
