It's amazing to think back just 20 years to a time when mobile phones were a novelty item carried by the rich, the important and the fashion conscious. Indeed, back then they were synonymous with greedy stock brokers, and for many people, their only contact with one was watching Mel Gibson use a brick-like cell phone in Lethal Weapon (1987).

Now "we dont need to tell you" they're everywhere. They've changed the way we run our lives (Could you pick up some butter on the way home?), arrange meetings (I'll call you when I get there), and share the tiny details of our lives with perfect strangers (I'm on the train - I said I'M ON THE TRAIN!).

Increasingly, people are opting out of fixed-line phone services, choosing instead to have only one phone in their lives; and with lots of options in terms of handset price and subscriber plans, mobile phones are clearly here to stay!

Mobile Phone Usage

While the functionality and sheer power of the mobile phone has increased dramatically in two decades, the two most fundamental shifts have both been downward: in size and price. And it is these changes that have led to the staggering statistics around mobile phones:

• More than 60% of people in world own a mobile phone (around 3.5 billion subscribers)
• In Russia there are over 50 million more phones in use than there are people!
• Other countries with more than 100% mobile phone use (phones per head of population) include Italy, Romania, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Hong Kong, Spain, Taiwan and Estonia. In Australia there are 94 phones for every 100 people.

Mobile phone dimensions

When the first mobile phone call was made by Motorola's Martin Cooper in New York in 1973, the unit weighed 1 kilogram; it was about the same size and weight as a litre carton of milk! Cooper's first call was to gloat to his rival at Bell Labs.

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