The Evolution of the Cell Phone — How Far It's Come!

This soldier was using a radio common carrier, which was introduced in the '60s as a precellular system. Like a radio, it could transmit voice communication through a push-to-talk system, but it used a public telephone network and had its own telephone number.

Gordon Gekko may have been the star of Wall Street, but his Motorola DynaTAC played a major supporting role. The classic brick phone had an LED screen and boasted 30 minutes of talk time with eight hours of standby. The DynaTAC was priced at almost $4,000 in the early '80s — no wonder it made its first appearance in the hands of bankers on Wall Street!

It was this phone with which Motorola employee Marty Cooper made the first mobile phone call.

The mid-'90s was a period of evolution for the mobile industry. The clamshell phone shed some heft and paved the way for the modern flip phone.

Snake! Interchangeable face plates! You either knew someone who had a Nokia 6000 Series phone or owned one yourself. The popular cell phone of the early '00s made mobile communication affordable and widely available for the masses.

Mobile-phone manufacturers looking to capitalize on the rise of SMS created a variety of wacky-looking phones that incorporated full-size QWERTY keyboards.

Ohhhh, the Razr. The slim, sleek, and superpocketable form factor made the Motorola flip phone, which launched in 2004, a surefire hit among the fashion-forward crowd.

The BlackBerry email client and BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry instant messaging took the mobile world by storm when it made its debut in the early '00s. Thumbs were never the same again.

In June 2014, Amazon got in on the cell phone game with the Fire phone. It comes with pretty innovative features, including a better camera and free photo storage in the cloud, 3D features, and Firefly technology, which can recognized 100 million items in the real world.

Touchscreen phones are getting lighter, wider, and more powerful — but what else can we expect for the future of mobile communication?

Devices will be more resistant to their environments and (hopefully) get much better battery life as technology advances. Sony launched the waterproof Xperia Z at 2013's CES, and Samsung followed suit in 2014 with the waterproof Galaxy S5.