DynaTAC
first certificated mobile phone model
The DynaTAC is a series of cellular telephones manufactured by Motorola from 1983 to 1994. Unveiled on March 6, 1983, the DynaTAC was the first commercially available handheld cellular phone. A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at US$3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $12,804.76 in 2025.
Several models followed, starting in 1985 with the 8000s and continuing with periodic updates of increasing frequency until 1993's Classic II. The DynaTAC was replaced in most roles by the much smaller MicroTAC when it was first introduced in 1989, and by the time of the StarTAC's release in 1996, it was obsolete.
Name
DynaTAC was an abbreviation of "Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage". The TAC abbreviation would later also be used on the MicroTAC, StarTAC and TeleTAC lines of products.
History
The first cellular phone was the culmination of efforts begun at Bell Labs, which first proposed the idea of a cellular system in 1947, and continued to petition the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for channels through the 1950s and 1960s, and research conducted at Motorola. In 1960, electrical engineer John F. Mitchell became Motorola's chief engineer for its mobile communication products.
“DynaTAC” enters the record as first certificated mobile phone model. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what DynaTAC, first and certificated can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1264871. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1994, 1984 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “DynaTAC” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.