The man who helped to invent the mobile phone has criticised Apple's iPhone for being overly complicated and hard to use.Martin Cooper, a former researcher at Motorola who made the world's first ever phone call from a mobile phone on April 3, 1973, told Forbes that he had only used his iPhone for a few weeks before giving it away to his grandson.
"A phone that's an internet appliance, an MP3 player, a camera and a whole bunch of other stuff doesn't make a lot of sense," he said. "You try to build a universal device that does all things for all people, and guess what? It doesn't do anything very well."
He also criticized the telecoms industry for its "upside down" practices. In particular, he questioned why wireless operators were still installing mobile phone masts outside when he said the majority of conversations occurred indoors.
"We were promised affordable, ubiquitous broaband wireless for everyone," he said. "That promise is still just a promise."
He said that femtocells - mobile phone stations connected by broadband internet and capable of boosting the network signal inside buildings - could be the answer.
"Where the cell sites ought to be is where the people are," he said.
However, Mr Cooper was full of praise for Google's Android open-source operating system for mobile phones, citing it as an example of the sort of open platform that would allow wireless devices to reach their full potential.
The first phone to run Android, the T-Mobile G1, goes on sale in the UK today. It makes its debut in a crowded marketplace dominated at one end by the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson, and by BlackBerry and Apple at the other. Apple recently announced that it had sold more than 13 million iPhones since the device went on sale in July last year.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
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