Gadgetory

it's build technology that's been to the moon it created some of the most iconic and beloved gadgets of the last century and it's made its fair share of costly mistakes today we look back at the history of Motorola the company that built the mobile phone as we know it today today Motorola is known for phones but back in the day its ambitions were a lot more broad and the company cooked up loads of different types of tech Motorola made TVs at a time when television was only just becoming popular it made pagers for hospitals and it was Motorola's radio technology that relate Neil Armstrong's first words from the moon landing that was 1969 but the good times didn't stop rolling in 1973 Motorola debuted its DynaTAC system for portable phones capable of beaming voices over the air and then into the regular telephone network and vice versa all managed by a central Motorola computer the company was keen to get its mobile phone up and running but it wasn't until a decade later that the first commercial handheld mobile went on sale it was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x an iconic product that established a decades-long tradition of giving mobile phones confusing names with lots of numbers and letters the 8000x way two and a half pounds was roughly 11 inches high and cost nearly $4,000 which is closer to 10,000 in today's money oh and you've got 20 minutes of talk time before the battery died the DynaTAC 8000x was nicknamed the brick for its unwieldy size and Motorola used it to build a stronghold of mobile dominance mobiles like the Micro tack and then later the StarTAC which popularized the flip phone and could vibrate instead of ring insured motorola remained the biggest phone maker in the world Finnish firm Nokia stall that crown in 1998 but Motorola stayed in the game keeping competitive until in 2004 it revealed its masterpiece the razor v3 hello more the v3 was the thinnest phone around and it practically used cool from its ultra slim frame motorola sold 50 million in under two years but enjoyed other big launches - such as the rocket II won in 2005 a partnership with Apple that put iTunes into a mobile phone trouble was the rocker wasn't very good it was slow you could only store a hundred songs and it didn't look that nice Apple still wanted to make an iPod that was also a phone but after the rocker it decided to take matters into its own hands the iPhone was a seismic shift catching out even high flyers like Nokia and Blackberry but its arrival highlighted a problem at Motorola namely that the firm had been riding the success of the razor too long facing intense competition Motorola went years without a hit and lost billions of dollars despite eventually getting its act together and producing some of the coolest early Android phones and making some neat advancements in battery technology 2011 saw the company split in two with the phone making parts soon purchased by Google then sold again in 2014 this time to Chinese tech company Lenovo Motorola's current standing is a far cry from the company that beamed down the moon landings but there are reasons to be hopeful in the last few years Motorola has built some of our favourite smartphones as well as some fantastic Mobile's at a low price it also managed to make a fairly decent SmartWatch using Google's Android wear these are the generation defining landmark products that made Motorola a household name it is today but it's a step in the right direction what do you think Motorola should do next let me know and stay tuned to seen it