British Telecom
4500X

This is a British Telecom branded variant of the Motorola 4500X transportable mobile phone which became available in 1986 and was derived from earlier car phone designs. It was portable, but weighing a whopping 4.3kg it took a strong arm to carry it any distance. Most of the weight came from the battery however, you were lucky to get more than one hour of talk time and the battery needed regular charging. The phone had a red LED display, a standard 12-digit numeric keypad and 5 additional keys: PWR which turned the mobile on and off, END which was used to terminate calls, SND which initiated dialling once the telephone number had been entered, MUTE which turned the microphone off and FCN which, when used in combination with other keys, gave access to a range of secondary functions such as call timers. On the side of the handset was a button for controlling the speaker and ringer volume. Other functions included displaying the telephone number assigned to the phone by pushing FCN and #. Given the cost of calls at the time, which were typically billed in one-minute increments, it was also possible to set an “Audible Call Timer” which provided a warning tone 10 seconds before the end of each minute of a call.