People have been working on the mobile phone for about as long as we have had a telephone system. Your definition of what a mobile phone is will help you decide the “whens” for mobile phones. Two-way radio mobile “phones” were used in automobiles in the late 1920s. Technically, these were not phones. The driver could not dial different numbers but only reach a central dispatch.
In the 1940s, conceptualization for mobile phones began but support for the technology was not around yet. A wireless telephone service was available in the larger cities in the US in the 1950s. This service was expensive and extremely limited.
Motorola started working on a portable cellular phone in 1973. They first began marketing this huge thing in 1983. Richard Gere uses something that looks a lot like the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X in the movie “Pretty Woman.” During the movie, he is constantly on the phone doing business and making deals in his fancy top-level hotel suite. However, since he’s inside and not driving around, this might have just been an early cordless phone. The Motorola DynaTAC cost $4000 and weighed just about two pounds.
Nokia had their version of a mobile phone in 1982. For people who had seen combat, this thing looked like two-way radio communications gear from the Vietnam War or something. For everybody else, it looked like a little boom box with a phone stuck on top. These phones would not fit in a pocket nor would they be practical to carry around on one’s shoulder. Many of these type mobile phones found themselves as permanent features of new car models. The weight did not matter as only the handset was lifted up. The advances in security and convenience made these phones sell like hotcakes.