Forgive me—I gotta’ go retro for a moment. At the 1979 or ’80 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a rep was showing the original 3-watt Motorola 800MHz/AMPS “brick” phones. He was mad because he’d been promised that LV would have limited cellular coverage by showtime. At that time I think there were 6 US cities that had cellular service on an experimental basis, with regular coverage in LA/NYC. He was fairly excited that ‘Advanced Mobile Phone Service’ {the original cellular} was going to outpace IMTS [The more traditional ‘Improved Mobile Telephone Service’—the briefcase-sized/mounted-on-the-driveshaft-hump sets] that had the same sized “G” handset that deskphones used. {Some were rotary dial too.}
IIRC, the brick phone had something like 20 minutes of talk time between overnight charges and the most local of calls were something like 79¢/minute.
