Cell Phone Photos

There is a reason for carrying that thing with me.  All these are off of my cell phone, no touch up.

Bay Farm Island

I like the stormy sky and the bright sun.

San Leandro Channel
Taken on my early morning bike ride.

Cisco Way
The parking lot at work

Alameda
In response to Rays wonderous cloudscapes, a typical Bay Area sky.

San Francisco
An evening quick stop at the end of my commute, nearly home.

Cellphones

I was just tidying up around the office and I found one of our old cell phones.  It's  a Motorola Transportable phone of the late 80's, early 90's.  I put my comparatively large Samsung Alias 2 on top for comparison.
Why is it so large?  Well, all cellphones are composed of radio, battery and hand set.

This is one of two batteries in the Motorola.  Yes, the phone needed two of these!

The sizable battery compartment, with one battery removed. 

Here we have the handset, keypad on the back, and yes a two line display.   

Color display?  Of course blue backlit LCD.

 

These are some of the vintage radio I was using in Callbox applications in the day.  Left to right, Oki, Motorola 3W OEM ,Motorola OEM.  Also for reference a handset and my Samsung.  We used to be able to achieve 9600bps data over the analogue network with an MNP10 modem.  We also were authorized by Motorola to use their command interface, the 3-wire bus.

Now we have three more modern radios.  These, two Enforas, and one MultiTech are all data capable and digital. It's strange, instead of waiting 2 minutes for the modem to train we can now establish a IP connection in a mere second.

Where have all the pay-phones gone?

I was at the airport yesterday and I noticed something different.

In these two photos you see a lot of shiny metal plates on the walls. Each of these plates covers where a pay phone used to be. Where there used to be about 20 pay phones there are now three pay phones, on wheelchair accessible, one TDD and one regular.



There is also a single phone card vending machine, and the white courtesy phones remain. This is all because of the advent of the cell phone. I can remember how these phone lobbies used to be so crowded and noisy. You'd have to stand patiently in line, and make sure you had a pocket full of quarters (or Thatchers in the UK). When I have my cell phone with me I think it's a good thing, but seeing these empty slots makes me think my cell phone is now essential. I wonder how many telephone engineers now work maintaining cell sites and microwave backbones, and how many used to work fixing land line pay phones and copper infrastructure.

As a point of interest, the photos were taken on my cell phone. I could even have posted this blog right there on the spot from my cell phone. If I had stood there trying to tell my thoughts to a passerby they would have thought me a loony, but if I blog it to thousands I'm sane?