Then Minister for Communications Jim Mitchell (right) makes Ireland’s inaugural mobile telephone call to RTÉ broadcaster Pat Kenny, December 11, 1985. Prices for the phones started at £1400 plus VAT
This morning.
Lia Stokes writes:
Today marks 35 years since the first ever mobile phone call was made in Ireland by Jim Mitchell, Minister for Communications to RTE broadcaster Pat Kenny.
To celebrate this milestone, Ireland’s longest serving mobile retail brand, Carphone Warehouse is looking back on the evolution of the mobile phone and how we use it.
In the 1980’s it was all car phones and brick phones, and with the cost coming in at around £3,000, they were few and far between. No one could have foreseen that mobile phones would become an extension of our work, home and social lives.
Carphone Warehouse entered the Irish market in 1996 with the opening of their first store on Grafton Street. The company, now has 81 shops across the country with a presence in most major towns and cities. They also employ over 600 people and serve over 4 million customers each year.
In a recent survey commissioned by the brand, 57% of respondents had a Nokia as their first mobile phone with just 2% having an iPhone. Interestingly, now 53% of those people have an iPhone as their current model, 30% using Samsung, 14% Huawei and just 3% accounting for other brands. (In a survey commissioned by Deloitte last year, it found that 91% of Irish people own a smartphone.)
Meanwhile…
Long talk!
Ciarán writes:
Still have the box (above) from my first one! (1995 I think)
Pat Kenny’s best American Pyscho impression
The maitre d at Guilbaud’s is on the line laughing his head off at Pat
touché
Probably wont be long before some idiots are again paying €1400 for a mobile.
Some are paying nigh on € 300+ for a set of ear buds. You can even get them engraved free!
And they wax lyrical about them.
You know when you get a SIM-card and have to pop out the tiny SIM from the credit-card-sized card?
You put the entire card into my first phone (Motorola of some kind) …
That was the Moterola Startac I believe
Thanks for that lead, but it was a predecessor to that: the MicroTAC. It had a pull-out (flexible) antenna and a flip-down to protect the keys
you can see the SIM here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNGnDzmgQ8A&t=330
You could pick up some of the 088 calls on the radio. Undertakers discussing removing gold rings etc. etc.’Did ye get it?’, ‘Did anyone see ya’?.
So I heard anyway.LOL
In those days (analog mobile) only doctors and drug dealers could afford or need mobile phones! XD
Haha takes me back, used to be able to pick it up on my tv an no one would believe me! Absolutely weird the first few times, mad stuff altogether!
I had one of those Ericsson phones back in the day
Pat’s chat?