Dave, in Brazil in 1996 we had the StarTac Elite series, still analog system. It was much more lighter. The first cell phone we had in home was in 1991, a TechnoPhone. It was about 2cm thick and had 2x10 alphanumeric LCD.
Motorola V3620 was the smallest Motorola analog phone I can think of. Still small even by today's standards. The brick format stuck around for a long time after phones started getting smaller. The main reason was power. Cell site placement was much more sparse back then, especially outside of urban areas. a 3 watt phone was necessary to complete calls for those who needed service on the edge of cell site coverage. -jc
Also the terminals underneath the battery that you were looking at are in fact the diagnostics port. There are 2 pins that you can short out on that to put the phone in "Engineer mode" When in that mode you used to be able to scan though the channels on your local cell and listen into ANY call being made through that cell. I can't believe it was so easy to do that back then. With some of the other phones of the time you needed to change the EPROM for engineer mode
The biggest, and most aazing part in the old analogue phones was the diplexing filter, which did an amazing job of allowing a receiver to work at minus ninety-something dBm sensitivity while the transmitter was simultaneously pumping about half a watt at (from memory) only 40Mhz away into the same antenna. True black magic.
When people look at these phones they say "Wow look at that massive antenna!" But antenna technology hasn't changed a bit, the only reason you don't need one is that now they have repeaters on every block. Now they just use the not even close to resonant outer case.
I worked for Moto during that period and I did build similar phones in the big factory in Liberty Ville Illinois. Ask me any thing about this phone. Burned fingers from that coax wire. Google just announced that they are selling the massive building that we used to build these phones.
I guess the StarTAC or MicroTAC were never available down under ? The MicroTAC was released in '89 and was already tiny compared to the DynaTAC and the StarTAC was released in '96. You may have not heard about the StarTAC since it did only sell 60 Million units worldwide. That phone you had was FAR, FAR away from being one of the last, or one of the smallest or one of anything for that matter. It's a cool piece of retro tech and I enjoyed the teardown.
I lived right near an analog cell phone antenna in the 90s. I tuned my old trinitron to somewhere around channel 82-83 and could listen to one side of the conversations for short periods of time. I heard an illegal trade "I got the goods, you got the money? yeah? I'm leaving it in the trashcans." and phone sex. LOTS of phone sex. But mostly just business and household calls. it was primarily boring.
Mike Stavola yeahhhh! I tried this too when i was a kid! Even cheap walkie talkies from china worked and my mind was stained with all the uh and ooh from some people! Now wiretapping is so illegal but how is it done these days?
+Mike Stavola In 1993, I went to Radio Shack to buy a scanner to listen to police and fire calls. The clerk was showing different models, and said "hey this on can pick up cell calls, and we can't sell them after next week or something". I said who would want to do that? Well, after I got home and heard the first cell call, I was hooked for a year, every night hours w/ my wife. It was amazing . My friend raced out to get one too. I was soo cool.
I remember when I was 12, I'd detune the TV in the UHF part of the dial - it was a great party trick showing other kids how to 'tap' mobile calls in the mid and late 90s heh.
Analogue phones got down to about the size of that Nokia 3310 before analogue died. Motorola was always behind the competition on size and weight as they sold on robustness. Even when much smaller ones were available, these bigger Motorolas were popular with people like builders as they were pretty indestructible. The earlier generation (8500?) Motorolas were amazing inside - lots of ceramic hybrids and metal-ceramic packages!
Motorola did make GSM "brick phones" for a while; they had a small graphical LCD and were extremely rugged. Size really wasn't considered an issue in this case; it was designed to be used in very rough environments and also had 7w transmitting power when used with external power.
In the 90s cellphones where designed the same way cordless phones where, they reuse pretty much the same parts, shape and logic, only the RF part was really different.
The Jack on the Bottom was for Headset/Mic Combo and the terminals under the Battery that are not used were for Programing the phone to the system carrier...
@EEVblog You ask why they did not made it smaller. It's because the antenna was still very large if they did and also the battery would stay the same size. They went bigger/did not decrease scale for more efficient radio and battery live. Also the handset was very small for it's time already.
for someone who's sold That phone i can tell ya what the pins on the back are for :) it's a connector for the programer in the store and a diag rig for the guys in the shop. you'd connect it to a PC and type in the custimer info and account and it would setup the phone.
I just happend to have my Motorola C118 (one of the best call-only mobiles out there IMHO) here when I watched this video.. wow. the size difference is amazing.
I got my first mobile phone in 1995; a Nokia 2140. That Motorola analogue phone was ancient even then, the only real difference between the 2140 and the 3310 was the introduction of lithium batteries.
IMHO mobiles have become to big again. What good is a huge screen if the thing does not fit in my pocket? Also, the ridiculousness of people holding a tablet to their head to make a phone call.
@artifactingreality What sucks about it compared to my previous videos? Yes, there is the odd glitch, as the editor does not seem entirely compatible with my original video files.
this was cutting edge tech back then, Surface mounted circuits were rare. You can only go so small when dealing with the higher voltages and Lower frequency..
Notes: Wireless "landline" phones tend to use the same components as cellphones 2-4 years older. Currently they usually operate in a reserved digital band around 4 to 5GHz, or over regular WiFi. Earlier cellphones actually had more lightweight handsets, wired to a base the size of a car stereo, but if you wanted to use it away from the car, you had to carry a bag with the base and a full size car battery inside. This is why they invented the SIM card, so you could carry it with your credit cards and insert it into the phone that came with whatever car or taxi you were in! Of cause by the time GSM took off, the phones were small enough to just carry with you, and the SIM card became a way to reduce carrier tie in (except in the US).
Yeah, sim cards quickly became simply a means of transferring phone hardware. I still dislike CDMA because of courier tie ins. There is no convenient way to use non-gsm phones on prepaid plans because of the lack of sim cards, and you have to go through a whole process to transfer new phones over to your plan.
I use to work for Verizon fixing Mobile phones, this brings back memories. Back then people were not use to mobile phones, this lady came in and said, my phone turns off everytime I answer it, I could not replicate the results so I asked her to demonstrate. She pressed the PWR button when I called the phone, I asked her why she did that her exact words are "Doesn't PWR mean Press While Ringing" I explained that she had to press send to answer and PWR mean power
Though I was too young to have a mobile phone when those really old analogue phones were in their prime I have venue memories of some of them with the red or green single line LED readouts. My first mobile phone was a Nokia 3310, I bought that in 2002 when I was 18, what a great phone it was, simple and yet very useable and it was cheap for the time and did what I wanted. I sometimes wonder if mobile phones having gone too far, doing more than they need to.
I don't know about analog-only phones, but the dual-band ones got a whole lot smaller than that Motorola monster. I used to own a Qualcomm 2760 analog/CDMA phone, and it was about the same size as that Nokia.
This looks like a slightly slimmed down version of the original "bag" portable phone design. These had higher transmit power (3W instead of 0.6W), so they probably just built a smallish phone around the existing RF design. There was a first generation of truly "mobile" phones out at that time, but they had lower transmit power. Even Motorola had one -- the MicroTAC "flip" phone, and later the tiny StarTAC. However, if you wanted wider coverage, you needed a car-mounted phone, or something like this "Ultra Sleek" unit.
I'm honestly surprised that thing was made in the US. And, just a suggestion, but if you ever get the chance, you should sell shirts that have your catchphrase, "Don't turn it on, take it apart!" on them. I would buy one.
My first mobile phone was a Motorola® MicroTAC I purchased in about 1998 and I am fairly certain it was not the newest nor latest model. At that time, I worked in the IT Department of a small telco and I had to be "on call" roughly one week per month (rotating schedule with my co-workers taking a week each also). The "on call" company phone was a Motorola® DynaTAC at least up until a few months after I got my MicroTAC. Both were analog. Our schedule meant we passed the "brick" to the next guy in the rotation on Monday morning. Those days. We worked a regular M-F schedule, from 08:00 until 17:00 with an hour off for lunch, plus OT as required, including the week we were on call. Getting a call at 01:00 and troubleshooting the problem, then still having to be at work for 08:00 was not fun. Neither was having to stay within 30 minutes of the office 24/7 the week "on-call". Having family events (like my siblings' karate tournaments) outside the 30-minute distance from the office was painful, often made worse by zero phone calls the entire time I was stuck at home the day of the event (typically between Friday evening & Saturday evening). Then, of course, there was going about the city with two mobile phones clipped to my belt, one each on opposite hips. Then there was fun when I was in the middle of a call on one phone and the other one rang. A couple of times talking to two different people on both phones concurrently, I swear I heard the voices switch ears (a phone in each hand at both ears simultaneously). The weird things the analog phones did sometimes when you had two of them on separate calls within a foot (0.3m) of each other. For those wondering, for after-hours calls, we got to try to troubleshoot and rectify the problem via telephone (and dial-up) first. If unable to, we had to drive to the office and try to fix the problem in person. If the problem was too severe, we got to call our Supervisor or Manager (waking them up if necessary). The occasional need to go to the office in person at any time of the night or weekend was the reason for the mandated 30 minute maximum from the office for the week we were on call. Usually both the Supervisor and Manager were NOT outside the 30 minute window simultaneously (although there wasn't an actual rule for them, IIRC). And, I went off on a tangent. Ahh, yes! The Motorola® "Brick" and the memories...
I remember someone owning a Sony "Mars Bar" analogue phone in the early 90s. So the Moto here really wasn't anything like the smallest. Must've been around the time digital started to take off, since I think the Mars Bar came in GSM too. For quite a while it was an amazing example of phone smallness.
The analog phones got much smaller than that. I have an analog motorola "flip fone". It had a little 8 character 5*7 LED dot matrix display which is socketed. A good source for those little "smart" LED displays.
old post, but you supposed to slide that Metal Clip down round that Hands Free Car Kit connector and undo the Antenna Nut at 07:45 Thats why the Ribbon Cable pulled out!
Dunno if they had that then! Could be a connection for testing at the factory, some machine, or bank of machines, might plug into it to measure everything's as it should be. Or possibly could be a connector for a different factory option, maybe the circuit board was used in several products, and some of those had PCBs connect through those pins.
Interesting teardown. Well done as usual, but design critique largely unfair. Size of phone mostly dictated by NiCd battery technology and sparseness of cell tower network. Once you factor these size and cost constraints into the phone, a larger ear speaker makes perfect sense to me. They needed to mimic the tonal feel of land phones of the day.
I was in a meeting years ago with our advertising agency and one of the owners always had the best stuff. You know the kind of guy that wears cuff links everyday and has an upscale interior designer create decorate his twins new room*. But anyway he had one and he made sure he put it on the able to "show" everyone his new toy. * Note after only a few months the twins tore everything off the walls including the expensive blinds. Ended up in a room with two beds thats all. :-)
Those were the days. Even when working with your mobile phone, you made muscles. And the probability to loose a brick-phone is very VERY slim. Nowadays they make 'em smaller, so that you can loose them, so that you can buy a new one even smaller compared to the previous because this is what's on the shop-shelves and you can't do anything about it. Damn!
i've cracked open a similar style phone, i recognise some of the parts, but the one i had used a dot matrix 7x2 style display. i think the speaker was a bit smaller. and i think one of the cans on the RF board will be a UHF amplifier MHW 803 or similar
+CapApollo Yes. I had an analog startac back in the day. The cellphone company offered me (and I took) a free digital phone just to stop using the analog connection, LOL.
It's all very well that modern mobile phones can do all the rings they do, recording and plain back high definition videos, browsing the internet, accessing social media, playing games, colour touch screens, complex operating systems and so on, but what about the basics, making phone calls? Not everyone wants a phone that can do all things under the sun, so I just wonder if any manufacturers still make basic phones made for making calls.
i bet that still is the smallest anologe phone. the way that phone operates is way different than digital phones. that phone sends out the actual voice as a signal but the small digital phone change your voice to 1s and 0s and makes those into signal.it takes a lot less power to send out 1s and 0s than it does to send your voice.thats why the anologe phone is bigger, because it needs more power
Hi Dave, regarding the reduction of speaker size along with the overall size in modern mobile phones I figured that it actually might have been a trade-off in terms of sound quality... e.g. I still prefer the bigger headphones over the small in-ears. Is there any chance you can test these speakers side by side? Thanks.
well, those where HUGE, but one thing I guess - range (between transmission towers) was probably huge too, since nowadays you have towers everywere, back on the days, they weren't everywere like now, And considering the size of the speaker, probably volume and quality were better, or at least one of those on a modern phone would be cool when it rings...
I just realized that Cellular phones weren't very common then so everyone was just pleased they could have a portable phone, they didn't care that it was huge and wieghed a ton and Motorola or whoever probably couldn't afford to spend too much money making it small. . My first phone was a motorola, fully analog and it had a similar display but it was a flip-phone. It had maybe an hour of battery life for talking :D Now you can get a phone thats tiny for 100 bucks its really amazing
I think you are wrong - the answer is in the production quantity. Maybe analog phone was expensive but not expensive enough to make highly integrated parts for it so it was constructed from on-the-shelf parts. On the contrary GSM phones were produced in huge quantities so there we have asics and much higher integration rate.
your antenna observation early on in the video also forgets something on why the antennas are now so small. the range on a new phone is also less and that's fine because we have a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT more points they can connect to.
Crayman122 Because most households have bricks that make up the actual house! (Usually the size of 2 of these phones, older phones were full brick size).
There is no such thing as an analog band and an analog antenna... In fact the 800Mhz band he refers to is now used for digital phones. Also, I bought a new Motorola analog flip-phone in 1998, albeit at the end of the run, but the phone he takes apart is more of early '90s. I find that the tone he uses to describes the design is rather condescending. One final note: Motorola no longer makes discrete semiconductors nor processors. They sold the business more than 10 years ago.
Then as now the battery volume dominated the size of the device. If the battery was huge, there would have been a law of diminishing returns on miniaturizing the circuit board or other parts of the phone. I think the economics of electronic manufacturing are to make it as big as you have room for, not as small as you can...
On modern mobile phones of course you have a SIM card that connects the phone to a given network and provides you with your mobile phone number, but how did this work with the older analogue mobile phones? If you wanted to change your network or number for some reason, could you do it easily or was there some process you had to go through in order to do that.
What do you think about hot glue? I use it on my little projects, like if I do a wire join, I first twist the wires together, then solder them liberally, then even more liberally cover them in hot glue, then wrap them in electrical tape... is this a good or bad idea?
Burnt your fingers from soldering it, or did it heat up when receiving? Cool job anyways. Did you ever leave a little mark or signature in the phones you made?
Those old bricks had far superior call quality than any super advanced smart phone you can get today, it was a professional business phone, I remember when phones got smaller there was a huge problem with call quality; still is. A lot of people didn’t “upgrade” to the newer phones for a long time because of that, they weren’t considered good enough for business. Even as big as they now seem, it was way smaller than a pager, a pocket full of coins and searching for a pay phone lol, remember those? Haha... the moral is just because it’s smaller and newer doesn’t mean it’s better. Stuff from the 60s, 70s and 80s still exists, almost nothing from the disposable 90s and 2000s does, it’s all in landfills.
mobile phones were an offshoot of the mobile radios at least when it came to the early days with motorla. many parts were the same for the 800mhz radios, well the phone is just a type of radio. high power small speakers and mics were not on the market for a few years. same with LEDs and displays. speaker is the size of headphone speakers of the time. component size also played into durability. these were high end items that were expected to last more than a few years of a contract.
Brings back memories for those of us "old" fuckers. I had one of the gray Motorolas with the giant battery that weighed a ton and slid onto the back, and the flap on the bottom that closed over the buttons. It worked well, did what it was built to do. But man. The damn things were expensive in every way. Calls were charged by the minute, and If you were on a road trip any appreciable distance from home, you'd get hit with nasty roaming charges on top of it. It was very possible to accidentally make a phone call that would cost you 30 bucks when all was said and done. For a single call!
I think they could have made it smaller however it would have cost more and really size was not a concern back then! We gradually went smaller and smaller, then with the iphone we started getting bigger again, although only on the face, the width is smaller than ever. I've got a broken iphone I can send you, it might be a nice comparison!
The design does look pretty old. Most of the layout is driven by the IC device packaging - big QFPs. I reckon you'd be hard pressed to get a much tighter layout with the same devices. A lot of the RF layout is hampered by those chunky XOs and ceramic filters. I agree it could have been made smaller/better - but as always at a price. Just my £0.02 worth.
@eevblog I'm trying to disassemble an ancient Motorola 8500X brick phone... it's even older than yours and has through-hole components in it. And also a lot of battery corrosion which is making it very hard to open.
I knew a guy that worked for Motorola back when that phone was built. He may have had a hand in its design. (He did PCB layout.) To hear him tell it, Motorola single-handedly brought mobile phones and cell technology to the masses. LOL.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Dave, in Brazil in 1996 we had the StarTac Elite series, still analog system. It was much more lighter.
The first cell phone we had in home was in 1991, a TechnoPhone. It was about 2cm thick and had 2x10 alphanumeric LCD.
Motorola V3620 was the smallest Motorola analog phone I can think of. Still small even by today's standards.
The brick format stuck around for a long time after phones started getting smaller. The main reason was power. Cell site placement was much more sparse back then, especially outside of urban areas. a 3 watt phone was necessary to complete calls for those who needed service on the edge of cell site coverage.
-jc
Also the terminals underneath the battery that you were looking at are in fact the diagnostics port. There are 2 pins that you can short out on that to put the phone in "Engineer mode" When in that mode you used to be able to scan though the channels on your local cell and listen into ANY call being made through that cell. I can't believe it was so easy to do that back then. With some of the other phones of the time you needed to change the EPROM for engineer mode
Ahh the days when you could hear phone conversations on a scanner lol.
The biggest, and most aazing part in the old analogue phones was the diplexing filter, which did an amazing job of allowing a receiver to work at minus ninety-something dBm sensitivity while the transmitter was simultaneously pumping about half a watt at (from memory) only 40Mhz away into the same antenna. True black magic.
When people look at these phones they say "Wow look at that massive antenna!" But antenna technology hasn't changed a bit, the only reason you don't need one is that now they have repeaters on every block. Now they just use the not even close to resonant outer case.
I worked for Moto during that period and I did build similar phones in the big factory in Liberty Ville Illinois. Ask me any thing about this phone. Burned fingers from that coax wire. Google just announced that they are selling the massive building that we used to build these phones.
Heh... I remember tuning into analog mobile phone conversations on my VCR, wading through the static. Good times.
I guess the StarTAC or MicroTAC were never available down under ? The MicroTAC was released in '89 and was already tiny compared to the DynaTAC and the StarTAC was released in '96. You may have not heard about the StarTAC since it did only sell 60 Million units worldwide. That phone you had was FAR, FAR away from being one of the last, or one of the smallest or one of anything for that matter. It's a cool piece of retro tech and I enjoyed the teardown.
My friend John worked for Motorola around that time but he was in the Processor business.
this is too cool, I looove old telecom stuff. Crazy how far we've come.
***** Sadly there isn't an easy way to check for brain tumors so most people simply die and it gets attributed to stroke or flu. We will never notice.
I lived right near an analog cell phone antenna in the 90s. I tuned my old trinitron to somewhere around channel 82-83 and could listen to one side of the conversations for short periods of time. I heard an illegal trade "I got the goods, you got the money? yeah? I'm leaving it in the trashcans." and phone sex. LOTS of phone sex. But mostly just business and household calls. it was primarily boring.
Mike Stavola Even in Poland in the 90s we got NMT 450 MHz analog cell phones and I remember getting random calls on our old TV:)
Mike Stavola yeahhhh! I tried this too when i was a kid! Even cheap walkie talkies from china worked and my mind was stained with all the uh and ooh from some people! Now wiretapping is so illegal but how is it done these days?
+Mike Stavola In 1993, I went to Radio Shack to buy a scanner to listen to police and fire calls. The clerk was showing different models, and said "hey this on can pick up cell calls, and we can't sell them after next week or something". I said who would want to do that? Well, after I got home and heard the first cell call, I was hooked for a year, every night hours w/ my wife. It was amazing . My friend raced out to get one too. I was soo cool.
I remember when I was 12, I'd detune the TV in the UHF part of the dial - it was a great party trick showing other kids how to 'tap' mobile calls in the mid and late 90s heh.
Used to drive around with a Bearcat scanner in the late 70's listening to the primitive car phones. Hilarious entertainment.
i love the instruction they even tell you to lift the phone to your ear also to lock press lock !!
I remember when I was a kid in the 90's I actually picked up a conversation on my toy walkie talkie. Only happened once though.
Analogue phones got down to about the size of that Nokia 3310 before analogue died. Motorola was always behind the competition on size and weight as they sold on robustness. Even when much smaller ones were available, these bigger Motorolas were popular with people like builders as they were pretty indestructible. The earlier generation (8500?) Motorolas were amazing inside - lots of ceramic hybrids and metal-ceramic packages!
Motorola did make GSM "brick phones" for a while; they had a small graphical LCD and were extremely rugged. Size really wasn't considered an issue in this case; it was designed to be used in very rough environments and also had 7w transmitting power when used with external power.
Maybe the last in Australia. The Motorola Startac Lite was also analog here in Brazil, and was much smaller than this one.
In the 90s cellphones where designed the same way cordless phones where, they reuse pretty much the same parts, shape and logic, only the RF part was really different.
Actually you do see micro co-ax cables running antennas in modern phones, usually for GPS.
In America, you could listen to people's calls with the FDMA phones with an old TV that got channels 70-83. 800 MHz.
Great idea for a teardown! The 7segs cracked me up.
The Jack on the Bottom was for Headset/Mic Combo and the terminals under the Battery that are not used were for Programing the phone to the system carrier...
18:20 - If today's phones had speakers like this one, they'd probably sound better!
I love the smiley face on the LCD frame of the Nokia.
@EEVblog
You ask why they did not made it smaller.
It's because the antenna was still very large if they did and also the battery would stay the same size.
They went bigger/did not decrease scale for more efficient radio and battery live.
Also the handset was very small for it's time already.
for someone who's sold That phone i can tell ya what the pins on the back are for :)
it's a connector for the programer in the store and a diag rig for the guys in the shop.
you'd connect it to a PC and type in the custimer info and account and it would setup the phone.
I just happend to have my Motorola C118 (one of the best call-only mobiles out there IMHO) here when I watched this video.. wow. the size difference is amazing.
I got my first mobile phone in 1995; a Nokia 2140. That Motorola analogue phone was ancient even then, the only real difference between the 2140 and the 3310 was the introduction of lithium batteries.
IMHO mobiles have become to big again. What good is a huge screen if the thing does not fit in my pocket? Also, the ridiculousness of people holding a tablet to their head to make a phone call.
That old speaker resembles the one in an old POTS Ericsson rotary dial telephone. This just goes to show how patents lay in the way of innovation.
@artifactingreality What sucks about it compared to my previous videos?
Yes, there is the odd glitch, as the editor does not seem entirely compatible with my original video files.
this was cutting edge tech back then, Surface mounted circuits were rare. You can only go so small when dealing with the higher voltages and Lower frequency..
I feel weird when watching this Ultra Sleek phone being torn apart in HD. It's cool to see the progress made in technology :)
Notes: Wireless "landline" phones tend to use the same components as cellphones 2-4 years older. Currently they usually operate in a reserved digital band around 4 to 5GHz, or over regular WiFi. Earlier cellphones actually had more lightweight handsets, wired to a base the size of a car stereo, but if you wanted to use it away from the car, you had to carry a bag with the base and a full size car battery inside.
This is why they invented the SIM card, so you could carry it with your credit cards and insert it into the phone that came with whatever car or taxi you were in! Of cause by the time GSM took off, the phones were small enough to just carry with you, and the SIM card became a way to reduce carrier tie in (except in the US).
John Doe Nice one bud, I always wondered why the 'sim card' thing came about with phones. :-)
Yeah, sim cards quickly became simply a means of transferring phone hardware. I still dislike CDMA because of courier tie ins. There is no convenient way to use non-gsm phones on prepaid plans because of the lack of sim cards, and you have to go through a whole process to transfer new phones over to your plan.
I use to work for Verizon fixing Mobile phones, this brings back memories. Back then people were not use to mobile phones, this lady came in and said, my phone turns off everytime I answer it, I could not replicate the results so I asked her to demonstrate. She pressed the PWR button when I called the phone, I asked her why she did that her exact words are "Doesn't PWR mean Press While Ringing" I explained that she had to press send to answer and PWR mean power
Did anyone notice the smiley in the Nokia phone at 21:43 :)
I remember these well, most people still had the "suitcase" analog models with a corded handset to a big ol brick with the battery and rf.
Oh man I used to sell those. $999 in 1993. So "Wall Street"... thanks for the memories.
My first mobile phone was a Voxson analogue, that I bought from the Cash Converters store in Dee Why, NSW. It looked similar to this Motorola inside.
Though I was too young to have a mobile phone when those really old analogue phones were in their prime I have venue memories of some of them with the red or green single line LED readouts. My first mobile phone was a Nokia 3310, I bought that in 2002 when I was 18, what a great phone it was, simple and yet very useable and it was cheap for the time and did what I wanted. I sometimes wonder if mobile phones having gone too far, doing more than they need to.
I don't know about analog-only phones, but the dual-band ones got a whole lot smaller than that Motorola monster. I used to own a Qualcomm 2760 analog/CDMA phone, and it was about the same size as that Nokia.
This looks like a slightly slimmed down version of the original "bag" portable phone design. These had higher transmit power (3W instead of 0.6W), so they probably just built a smallish phone around the existing RF design.
There was a first generation of truly "mobile" phones out at that time, but they had lower transmit power. Even Motorola had one -- the MicroTAC "flip" phone, and later the tiny StarTAC. However, if you wanted wider coverage, you needed a car-mounted phone, or something like this "Ultra Sleek" unit.
Man, I really miss my dad's analog bag phone. That thing always had awesome reception.
I'm honestly surprised that thing was made in the US. And, just a suggestion, but if you ever get the chance, you should sell shirts that have your catchphrase, "Don't turn it on, take it apart!" on them. I would buy one.
Why are you surprised? Almost EVERYTHING used to be made here.
Yep. That's why the Apple LISA cost 10,000 USD in 1983, or about 24,000 USD in 2015 dollar.
It's sure is expensive to be a patriot.
actually the lisa was mostly made in ireland
My first mobile phone was a Motorola® MicroTAC I purchased in about 1998 and I am fairly certain it was not the newest nor latest model. At that time, I worked in the IT Department of a small telco and I had to be "on call" roughly one week per month (rotating schedule with my co-workers taking a week each also). The "on call" company phone was a Motorola® DynaTAC at least up until a few months after I got my MicroTAC. Both were analog. Our schedule meant we passed the "brick" to the next guy in the rotation on Monday morning.
Those days. We worked a regular M-F schedule, from 08:00 until 17:00 with an hour off for lunch, plus OT as required, including the week we were on call. Getting a call at 01:00 and troubleshooting the problem, then still having to be at work for 08:00 was not fun. Neither was having to stay within 30 minutes of the office 24/7 the week "on-call". Having family events (like my siblings' karate tournaments) outside the 30-minute distance from the office was painful, often made worse by zero phone calls the entire time I was stuck at home the day of the event (typically between Friday evening & Saturday evening).
Then, of course, there was going about the city with two mobile phones clipped to my belt, one each on opposite hips. Then there was fun when I was in the middle of a call on one phone and the other one rang. A couple of times talking to two different people on both phones concurrently, I swear I heard the voices switch ears (a phone in each hand at both ears simultaneously). The weird things the analog phones did sometimes when you had two of them on separate calls within a foot (0.3m) of each other.
For those wondering, for after-hours calls, we got to try to troubleshoot and rectify the problem via telephone (and dial-up) first. If unable to, we had to drive to the office and try to fix the problem in person. If the problem was too severe, we got to call our Supervisor or Manager (waking them up if necessary). The occasional need to go to the office in person at any time of the night or weekend was the reason for the mandated 30 minute maximum from the office for the week we were on call. Usually both the Supervisor and Manager were NOT outside the 30 minute window simultaneously (although there wasn't an actual rule for them, IIRC). And, I went off on a tangent.
Ahh, yes! The Motorola® "Brick" and the memories...
Thanks for sharing
OMG MORE OF THIS! I'm literally drooling over this one lol
I remember someone owning a Sony "Mars Bar" analogue phone in the early 90s. So the Moto here really wasn't anything like the smallest. Must've been around the time digital started to take off, since I think the Mars Bar came in GSM too. For quite a while it was an amazing example of phone smallness.
The analog phones got much smaller than that. I have an analog motorola "flip fone". It had a little 8 character 5*7 LED dot matrix display which is socketed. A good source for those little "smart" LED displays.
old post, but you supposed to slide that Metal Clip down round that Hands Free Car Kit connector and undo the Antenna Nut at 07:45 Thats why the Ribbon Cable pulled out!
Dunno if they had that then!
Could be a connection for testing at the factory, some machine, or bank of machines, might plug into it to measure everything's as it should be.
Or possibly could be a connector for a different factory option, maybe the circuit board was used in several products, and some of those had PCBs connect through those pins.
I designed the T-Shirt, you can get it from my Merch store.
Interesting teardown. Well done as usual, but design critique largely unfair. Size of phone mostly dictated by NiCd battery technology and sparseness of cell tower network. Once you factor these size and cost constraints into the phone, a larger ear speaker makes perfect sense to me. They needed to mimic the tonal feel of land phones of the day.
+Walt S Did you watch the whole video? Dave mentions the size of the battery, and how they might worked around it.
Imagine someone in 1993 watching this, would blow their minds even more than ours.
We can safely say that Dave won't be casted to be in Neighbours any time soon. lol
I was in a meeting years ago with our advertising agency and one of the owners always had the best stuff. You know the kind of guy that wears cuff links everyday and has an upscale interior designer create decorate his twins new room*. But anyway he had one and he made sure he put it on the able to "show" everyone his new toy.
* Note after only a few months the twins tore everything off the walls including the expensive blinds. Ended up in a room with two beds thats all. :-)
Those were the days. Even when working with your mobile phone, you made muscles. And the probability to loose a brick-phone is very VERY slim. Nowadays they make 'em smaller, so that you can loose them, so that you can buy a new one even smaller compared to the previous because this is what's on the shop-shelves and you can't do anything about it. Damn!
i've cracked open a similar style phone, i recognise some of the parts, but the one i had used a dot matrix 7x2 style display. i think the speaker was a bit smaller. and i think one of the cans on the RF board will be a UHF amplifier MHW 803 or similar
Wish phones were still like that, the new ones with their cameras, recorders and addictive nature are a menace.
some startac series were analog too.
+CapApollo Yes. I had an analog startac back in the day. The cellphone company offered me (and I took) a free digital phone just to stop using the analog connection, LOL.
It's all very well that modern mobile phones can do all the rings they do, recording and plain back high definition videos, browsing the internet, accessing social media, playing games, colour touch screens, complex operating systems and so on, but what about the basics, making phone calls? Not everyone wants a phone that can do all things under the sun, so I just wonder if any manufacturers still make basic phones made for making calls.
i bet that still is the smallest anologe phone. the way that phone operates is way different than digital phones. that phone sends out the actual voice as a signal but the small digital phone change your voice to 1s and 0s and makes those into signal.it takes a lot less power to send out 1s and 0s than it does to send your voice.thats why the anologe phone is bigger, because it needs more power
Hi Dave, regarding the reduction of speaker size along with the overall size in modern mobile phones I figured that it actually might have been a trade-off in terms of sound quality... e.g. I still prefer the bigger headphones over the small in-ears. Is there any chance you can test these speakers side by side? Thanks.
well, those where HUGE, but one thing I guess - range (between transmission towers) was probably huge too, since nowadays you have towers everywere, back on the days, they weren't everywere like now, And considering the size of the speaker, probably volume and quality were better, or at least one of those on a modern phone would be cool when it rings...
This phone was made around 1991, as you can see by one of the chips
I just realized that Cellular phones weren't very common then so everyone was just pleased they could have a portable phone, they didn't care that it was huge and wieghed a ton and Motorola or whoever probably couldn't afford to spend too much money making it small. . My first phone was a motorola, fully analog and it had a similar display but it was a flip-phone. It had maybe an hour of battery life for talking :D Now you can get a phone thats tiny for 100 bucks its really amazing
I think you are wrong - the answer is in the production quantity. Maybe analog phone was expensive but not expensive enough to make highly integrated parts for it so it was constructed from on-the-shelf parts. On the contrary GSM phones were produced in huge quantities so there we have asics and much higher integration rate.
It amazing how much space they wasted just to have backlit keys with that chunk of acrylic
your antenna observation early on in the video also forgets something on why the antennas are now so small. the range on a new phone is also less and that's fine because we have a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT more points they can connect to.
I love the LED screen on it.
"Don't turn it on, take it apart!" I live my life by this.
@@Ben_Dover753 Badum tssssssss
@@Ben_Dover753 Jesus, that was 8 years ago....so just to update, still going well...
Crayman122 Because most households have bricks that make up the actual house! (Usually the size of 2 of these phones, older phones were full brick size).
This is nothing like the milspec construction of the original DynaTac phones.
Cool, that thing still turns on!
Wow, compared the Motorola 94' to the Nokia, a lot has changed in those 6 years (1994-2000)!
There is no such thing as an analog band and an analog antenna... In fact the 800Mhz band he refers to is now used for digital phones.
Also, I bought a new Motorola analog flip-phone in 1998, albeit at the end of the run, but the phone he takes apart is more of early '90s.
I find that the tone he uses to describes the design is rather condescending.
One final note: Motorola no longer makes discrete semiconductors nor processors. They sold the business more than 10 years ago.
Then as now the battery volume dominated the size of the device. If the battery was huge, there would have been a law of diminishing returns on miniaturizing the circuit board or other parts of the phone. I think the economics of electronic manufacturing are to make it as big as you have room for, not as small as you can...
It's interesting to compare this US built to a contemporary Japanese phone such as the Sony CM-h333 mars bar.
Awwww, he featured my HTC Desire. :)
I am willing to bet you the people at motorola were like "Wow, I cant believe you got it all into such a small package! Thats *amazing*!!"
On modern mobile phones of course you have a SIM card that connects the phone to a given network and provides you with your mobile phone number, but how did this work with the older analogue mobile phones? If you wanted to change your network or number for some reason, could you do it easily or was there some process you had to go through in order to do that.
What do you think about hot glue? I use it on my little projects, like if I do a wire join, I first twist the wires together, then solder them liberally, then even more liberally cover them in hot glue, then wrap them in electrical tape... is this a good or bad idea?
Hi, is there a way to replace the batteries in the battery compartment? It seems very difficult to open it up. Any ideas?
Dave mentions the connector is an 'old school' way to join two circuit boards. What would be used today?
Burnt your fingers from soldering it, or did it heat up when receiving? Cool job anyways. Did you ever leave a little mark or signature in the phones you made?
An excellent tear down. I bet these phones were expensive in their day?
Those old bricks had far superior call quality than any super advanced smart phone you can get today, it was a professional business phone, I remember when phones got smaller there was a huge problem with call quality; still is. A lot of people didn’t “upgrade” to the newer phones for a long time because of that, they weren’t considered good enough for business. Even as big as they now seem, it was way smaller than a pager, a pocket full of coins and searching for a pay phone lol, remember those? Haha... the moral is just because it’s smaller and newer doesn’t mean it’s better. Stuff from the 60s, 70s and 80s still exists, almost nothing from the disposable 90s and 2000s does, it’s all in landfills.
just one of the boards inside is thicker than a modern 2016 smartphone. wow.
mobile phones were an offshoot of the mobile radios at least when it came to the early days with motorla. many parts were the same for the 800mhz radios, well the phone is just a type of radio.
high power small speakers and mics were not on the market for a few years. same with LEDs and displays. speaker is the size of headphone speakers of the time.
component size also played into durability. these were high end items that were expected to last more than a few years of a contract.
Brings back memories for those of us "old" fuckers. I had one of the gray Motorolas with the giant battery that weighed a ton and slid onto the back, and the flap on the bottom that closed over the buttons. It worked well, did what it was built to do. But man. The damn things were expensive in every way. Calls were charged by the minute, and If you were on a road trip any appreciable distance from home, you'd get hit with nasty roaming charges on top of it. It was very possible to accidentally make a phone call that would cost you 30 bucks when all was said and done. For a single call!
Ahh, Tandy, haven't heard that name in a while. That place was my favourite hangout as a kid.
the startac was the last of the analog phones that were on the amps system.
Hi,
Here is something I would really want to know. What effect does this analogue phone have on the Fluke Multimetre?
you should do a teardown of the largest and oldest one and compare it to one of these
The braid of that coax was soldered to the foil for an antenna groundplane
I think they could have made it smaller however it would have cost more and really size was not a concern back then! We gradually went smaller and smaller, then with the iphone we started getting bigger again, although only on the face, the width is smaller than ever. I've got a broken iphone I can send you, it might be a nice comparison!
@Desmaad DOH! It's was late...
The design does look pretty old. Most of the layout is driven by the IC device packaging - big QFPs. I reckon you'd be hard pressed to get a much tighter layout with the same devices. A lot of the RF layout is hampered by those chunky XOs and ceramic filters. I agree it could have been made smaller/better - but as always at a price. Just my £0.02 worth.
@eevblog I'm trying to disassemble an ancient Motorola 8500X brick phone... it's even older than yours and has through-hole components in it. And also a lot of battery corrosion which is making it very hard to open.
I knew a guy that worked for Motorola back when that phone was built. He may have had a hand in its design. (He did PCB layout.) To hear him tell it, Motorola single-handedly brought mobile phones and cell technology to the masses. LOL.
I guess they didn't bother trying to make them smaller since they knew they'd have to put a big battery on it to get reasonable talk time.