cell phone
Facts and figures
It's hard to believe that be fore 1982 people in the United States hadn't used cell phones and hadn't ever sent text messages. In 1983 the first commercial cell phone company in the USA started in Chicago,even though the technology had existed since the 1940s.By 1987 more than one million Americans were cell phone customers . Before that,People outdoors could only make phone calls from public phone booths on the streets.
Early cell phone were much larger than today's models . Most of them were in cars,and they were very big and heavy .They were also very expensive . Owners of cell phone at that time had often paid more than a thousand dollars for them.
By the beginning of the 1990s,companies in the USA had changed their cell phones . The new phones weighed about 1 pound(450 grams) and the batteries lasted longer,whereas before they had lasted for one hour's talk time at most.
Nowadays,thanks to microchip technology,cell phones weigh about 2 ounces(60 grams) and have a talk time of up to five hours with a battery life of several days.By 2003 there were 160 million cell phone users in the USA, and today more than 60% of the adult population in the USA own a cell phone.
Another huge surprise has been the dramatic growth in text messaging. In 2001 only 30,000 text messages were sent in the entire United States now almost four billion text messages are sent every month.Nobody had expected cell phones to became so popular.