The Motorola Dynatac Mobile phone or The Brick as it was nicknamed has been voted the number one Gadget of all time. This mighty invention cost around $4000 (about $10,000 today) when it was invented in around 1984, took ten hours to charge and produced an hour of talk time. One could only make and receive calls. Motorola invested millions of dollars in research and development (about $1.5 billion in today’s money which is a staggering amount) but without it things wouldn’t have changed much.

The average person would never have imagined being able to touch one let alone own one and lets face it most of us thought it a showy sort of Yuppie accessory that would never catch on.

How wrong can any of us be? We can hardly live without them today and the modern siblings can do so much more and I mean so much more!!!

But hang on a minute; does this gadget really earn the spot of number one? Jason Bradbury from the Gadget Show seems to think so and the folk they commissioned to vote.

I must admit I was sceptical at first but looking at the remit for the entry rules I gradually changed my thoughts.

All entries must have electronics in them to do stuff. They must also be able to do something and help our lives. They should be within the last 50 years. They must be a gadget.

There were contenders, and worthy contenders too, to rival this phone. The likes of the Apple iPhone, the GoPro action cam, the Kindle reader, The Panasonic Microwave??, The JVC Video Recorder, Occulus Rift VR and the Sony Walkman to name a few but they were not considered winners. They all made the top twenty though which is cool.

So lets look at this a little more deeply shall we?

Crap; do we have to?

No, but it may be fun. Well it is to me.

If Motorola hadn’t invested all that cash and brain-power into inventing this (at the time small) truly mobile phone then much of what we enjoy or don’t enjoy would never have come to pass.

I find it quite strange that as humans we find it hard to talk face to face but stick a phone or computer in our hands and we can talk for hours. Maybe it takes the personal out  of communication or it’s just less interactive. How many of us older ones were guilty of sneaking into a room to use the family phone to ring up a mate or girlfriend only to be bollocked by a parent for the size of the phone bill?

Today’s generation can enjoy many free minutes of air time or texts via their mobiles and have had their brains and lives taken over by these gadgets and that’s the rub; thats the payback of invention.

Our modern “Smart” phones are so much more than just a simple call making device. In fact they have replaced the need  for a camera, a games consul, a pen and paper, a music Walkman, a book, an encyclopedia and a computer. So if it was for that first ever “Brick” then things would be very different today and maybe very little would have changed.

So possibly I do agree that this  phone should  be number  one as it started a very big revolution in technology development.