Here's how much cellphones have actually changed over the years

It’s difficult to imagine a time without cell phones connecting us to people across the city, country, and world.

Features we might take for granted, like being able to change our background, type with a full keyboard (plus emojis) and send unlimited messages were all developed and introduced over a rather long period of time.

A lot has changed since the cell-phone was invented. Here's what it has looked like over the years.

The first phone weighed over two pounds.

In 1973, the first call from a hand-held device was made with a phone shaped like a brick that weighed about 2.4 pounds. Martin Cooper, an executive at Motorola, picked up the large device — one that only worked for 30 minutes of chatting after a 10-hour charge — and called Dr. Joel Engel, an engineer at their rival company, Bell Labs, reported Wired.

Over the past half-century, the cell phone has become much smaller and easier to carry around, and it’s evolved to connect us in ways that Cooper and Engel perhaps never imagined.

In 1983, Motorola released a $4,000 phone.

It took about 10 years to make the phone Cooper used for the first call available to the commercial public. According to Wired, in 1983, Motorola released the DynaTAC which was still bulky and heavy and cost approximately $4,000 But it wasn’t until 1989 that phones began to shrink in size with the Motorola MicroTac, a flip phone small enough to fit inside a shirt pocket.

Nokia got involved in the 2000s.

At the turn of the century, Nokia burst onto the scene taking the cellphone market by storm. The Nokia 6000 series introduced phones with durable, rectangular shape that fit perfectly into a palm, purse, or pocket. It was the first cell phone made more affordable for the masses and it allowed them to browse the web, according to The Telegraph.

Around the same time, Samsung released the Samsung SPH-I300 which allowed its users to directly touch the screen of the phone to dial. Sound familiar? This phone easily resembles a distant relative of today’s touchscreen smartphone, according to PC Magazine.