With all the talk of funky new gadgets we thought it would be good to ground ourselves with a look back into the mists of time (known as the 80's and 90's) and take a peek at what used to pass as a mobile phone or classic mobiles as we now lovingly call them.

Back in the days when yuppies roamed the land consumed great quantities of champagne and bought vintage cars for stupid sums of money the mobile phone was most desirable but nothing more than an electronic brick, a 10 number memory was the latest feature and the battery was 5 times the size of the handset, don't believe me then look at this. ---->>

The classic Dyna TAC 8000X was one of the first mobiles on the market and the one that you saw all yuppies yelling into in the Sloaney Pony public house, not because of the phone (they were well built as you can see) but sadly the network coverage didn't reach outside London and sometimes not even outside the pub! With 1 whole hour of talk time and 8 hours standby this was the start of a communication revolution, mind you with call rates @ £1+ a minute to stay on the phone for an hour you needed to be a stock broker.

Motorola were the ones forging the way with the Star Tac phones through the early years and by the late 80's the phones had shrunk to a more manageable size, well not in today's terms but at least you didn't develop new muscle groups through regular use.

The StarTac brought in a new era of personal communications and started the boom which led to the limited analogue capacity becoming filled very quickly, soon the 2 networks (Voda and Cellnet) became 3 with the all digital Orange!  Of course for those who joined orange (like LP in 1995) the range was back to the dark ages compared to the now extensive analogue network coverage. It all brings back memories of coverage maps, when did you last see a network coverage map? we all now assume near 100% coverage, although 3G is bringing back the maps again!

The early days or orange boosted Nokia as a handset provider as there was only one phone the Nokia Orange or 5.1 to its owners, again brick like compared to today's sleek numbers and with a battery life of an asthmatic hamster, but as mobile sales rocketed both Nokia and Motorola put in huge development budgets to miniaturise the phones and increase battery life and features.

Then the age of the flip and the slider, first Motorola had the flip and advertised it with a dog hanging off it to prove how strong it was, Nokia came back fighting with the banana phone which had a curvy slider, this later morphed into the "matrix" phone with a quick release slider.

And so as we at Lordpercy.com look forward to new technology and gadgets its to LP's own collection of orange phones that we leave the final picture and what a fine collection of microchips and plastic they are, truly classic mobiles.