DEL MAR: The problem with mobile phones is that people look at them too much. According to the man who invented them 50 years ago, that's at least.
Martin Cooper, an American engineer who called the Father of the Cell phone, says the neat little device we have in our pockets has almost unlimited potential and could one day help conquer disease.
We can be a little obsessed right now.
I am devastated when I see someone crossing the street looking at their cell phone. The 94-year-old told the AFP from his office in Del Mar, California.
But after a few people get run over by cars, they'll figure it out, he joked.
Cooper is wearing an Apple Watch and has a top-end iPhone, which flicks between his email, photos, YouTube and the controls for his hearing aids.
He gets his hands on the latest model every time it is updated, and gives it a thorough road test.
He admits that it can feel a bit too, with several million apps available.
I will never understand how to use my cell phone like my grandchildren and great grandchildren do, he says.
Cooper's iPhone, which he says he likes to use mostly to speak to people, is a very long way from the weighty block of wires and circuits he used to make the very first mobile phone call on April 3, 1973.
He was working for Motorola at the time, leading a team of designers and engineers who were engaged in a race to come up with the first properly mobile technology and not being squeezed out of an up-and- coming market.
The company had invested millions of dollars in the project in order to beat the Bell System, a giant US telecoms company that dominated US telecoms for more than a century since its inception in 1877.
Bell had proposed the idea of a cellular phone system just after World War II, and by the late 1960s had taken it as far as putting phones in cars - partly because of the huge battery they needed.
That didn't represent real mobility for Cooper.
He wanted a device that you could use anywhere, at the tail end of 1972.
With the full resources of Motorola at his disposal, he brought together experts on semiconductors, transistors, filters and antennae who worked around the clock for three months.
By the end of March they had cracked it, unveiling the DynaTAC dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage phone.
He said that the phone weighed over a kilo -- about two and a half pounds - and had a battery life of around 25 minutes of talking.
That was not a problem. This phone was so heavy that you couldn't hold it up for 25 minutes. That very first phone call didn't have to be long.