Brick mobile phones

Brick mobile phones from the 80s are rapidly becoming hot collectibles. A large number manufacturers that competed in the burgeoning mobile phone market in the mid to late 80s. Some of the well known brands from today were there in the early days. Motorola made the world's first hand held mobile phone, the 8000X. Nokia launched its own handportable range with the Nokia Cityman series in 1987. But who remembers British company, Technophone, which was swallowed up by Nokia?

In the UK the mobile phone market was shared between two operators, Cellnet and Vodaphone. However, customers did not deal directly with either of these two organisations, but with Service Providers. The Service Providers could sell any handsets they wanted for the particular network provider. This led to a large range of different handsets being available in the UK. In the second half of the 80s you could choose phones made by Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Mitsubishi, NEC, Panasonic and Technophone.

This section is a survey of some of the more important brick phones from the early 80s. It should help collectors identify the phones they are after and provide useful information for bidding on eBay.

A brick mobile phone is a phone that is roughly shaped like a house brick. They generally had aerials, either pull out, or fixed rubber ones. They were heavy to carry around and very obvious, so not for shy and retiring types. If you had a mobile in those days you wanted people to know about it.

Motorola brick phones

Motorola marketed the 8000X and 8000S in the UK from 1985. The 8000S was a slighly cheaper model with one fewer function key. Both these phones were also sold in the US. Larger and brighter LEDs were introduced in 1987 with the 8500X, in the UK and 8000M in the US.

For the 90s, Motorola launched slimmer phones with the Classic, Classic II, Ultra and Ultra II in the US. In the UK these phonew were the 8800X, 8900X and 888. The other Motorola brick phone was the Motorola Independent, launched in 1992. It was of similar size and appearance to the 8500X.

Can you use Motorola brick phones on modern networks?

Answer: generally no, but there are two brick phones you can use on modern digital networks: the Motorola 3200 and 3300 International. Both were designed for GSM in Europe, before it came to the UK. You can send texts on the 3300.