Mobile phone inventor says wearables will replace smartphones

Martin Cooper, widely considered as the man who invented the mobile phone, has predicted a wearable tech revolution where embedded wearable form factors will eventually replace smartphones.

"You can't tell the difference between Android and iOS today, they all do the same things," he told Wareable. "My vision of the specialised phone is one that is designed for you personally, around your personality, your education, your job and has attributes that are based upon you.

“Everyone will wear on them what I call a ‘personal server’ and the personal server is what connects them to the world."

Cooper conceived the first handheld mobile phone, which differed from the existing carphone, while working for Motorola in the 1970s. In November 1972, he began working on a prototype of the Dyna-Tac cell phone and, five months later, made the world's first call from a mobile phone.

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He told us that his vision of a personal server would be powered by a range of wearable tech devices.

“You will have on your body a whole load of, what you'd call, wearables, but they may be embeddables, and all of those communicate with the server," he explained.

"It may be half a dozen wearable devices or maybe an undershirt that measures everything and this phone embedded under your ear, and they're all specialised to you. Why? Because everybody is different from everyone else.

“The optimal phone would be in my ear or embedded under my skin and I would be just talking to you, and you would have called me by just talking to your phone, and we'd do all these things without noticing that the technology was there; as though we were standing next to each other.”

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Cooper was speaking to Wareable as part of a bigger series of features we have coming your way. So be sure to bookmark Wareable for all the upcoming content.

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