From Brick to Slick: A History of Mobile Phones [WIRED SLIDESHOW]

When I was a kid I had an intense fascination with walkie talkies. My brother and I had toys connected with wire, and we did the tins and string things. Even as a teenager I remained fascinated, and spent a few thousand rand on a very expensive model...it had a range of over 1 kilometre. My only problem was not too many people to talk to...so I sold them to my dad who used them on his building sites.

It occured to me then how dumb it was that we had phones. It still seems dumb that cellular phones need to be so expensive when walky talkies cost as much as the batteries to run them.
Is that the next step - private walky talky networks? Hmmmm...
That's a BIG IDEA, another was to do a project of mapping the world...everything...using citizens to post photos or scans. All this gets fed into a computer and 'confirmed' using satellite mapping. Then you access this visual program when you get lost or when you want to go somewhere and want to figure out what's there...BIG IDEA #2...

clipped from www.wired.com It has been more than 35 years since Martin Cooper placed the first call on a mobile phone to his rival at Bell Labs while working at Motorola. Heck, it's been nearly 20 years since Saved by the Bell’s Zack Morris placed a phone call to Kelly Kapowski from his locker. In that time, phones have come a long way. We now live in a golden age of mobile phones. Or, perhaps more accurately, the end of the age of mobile phones. The iPhone, the G2, the N95, the Bold: These are exceptionally small mobile computers with built-in telephony features.