Cell phones for 'tweens?

As years go by, cellular phones have become must-haves for adults and teenagers, as well as young children now. The reason for this is because cell phones make children and teenagers feel grown-up, and supposedly look cool to have. Also, parents give their children cell phones for emergency purposes, so that they can keep in touch. Phones such as the Firefly, a cell phone that has only five keys for speed-dialing parents, allow young children to call no more than twenty-two numbers. By the end of 2006, over six million children in America between the ages of eight and twelve years old have had cell phones. The Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm in Boston estimates that by 2010, over ten million preteens will have a cell phone. Over the past four years, the number of children at the age of eight who have cell phones has more than doubled. The number of nine-year-olds went from 500,000 to over one million.

In 1981, the first cell phone network began in Saudi Arabia. In 1983, the first cell phone became commercially available. This was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. In the eighties, mobile phones were larger than ones used now. They were first designed to be installations in cars, and were first called “car phones.” The name for car phone models was “Nationales Autotelefone” in Switzerland, and “Natel,” the abbreviation of it, is the designation for mobile phones. These later converted to transportable phones, which were about the size of a briefcase. The first company to introduce an actual portable phone was Motorola.