A bright pink Motorola flip phone was actually the very first mobile phone I ever owned and it was a gift for my 12th birthday. I thought it was the prettiest and coolest phone ever and I felt like a queen whenever I would text my few friends who also had a mobile, play snake, or dramatically flip my phone shut when I hung up on my mum.

As I grew up I found the development and advancements of the mobile phone such an interesting and exciting thing to witness. Like the size of mobiles for instance, they started really big and then they got so small and now the iPhone plus is nearly the size of a book. Or the colour, it was so on trend to have a coloured phone at the beginning and then neutral colours were all the rage and now bright colours are slowly slipping back into fashion (hence all the crazy phone covers available.)

The Motorola StarTAC was a clamshell mobile phone manufactured by Motorola. It was released 21 years ago on 3rd January 1996. It was the first ever clamshell and flip mobile phone and the beginning mark of a new era of technology, economy and communication.

In 2005 PC world put StarTAC at #6 in the ’50 greatest gadgets of the past 50 years’

Some features of the Motorola StarTAC were SMS text message, vibrate alert, network connection notifier, ability to run on a lithium-ion battery and a relatively light and small mobile device in comparison to most phones on the market.

It was one of the first devices to develop a widespread public hype and consumer adoption and there were approximately 60 million star tacs were sold.