Can you hear me now?

The cellphone turned 40 last week which is shocking news for those of us who still remember secret agent Maxwell Smart and his marvelous high-tech shoe.

Back in the Get Smart days, of course, phones were still dumb. That is, they were intended for talking only, which is almost the last thing a mobile phone is meant for today. They certainly weren’t some essential, enslaving device that simply must be attended to at every idle moment: crossing the street; in the queue at Walmart; at the bus stop; even in the bathtub. A recent study concluded that 60 per cent of cellphone owners check their device within 15 seconds of waking up.

On April 3, 1973, Marty Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, called a rival colleague at another telecom company in New York and announced he was speaking from “a ‘real’ cellular telephone.” The brick-like device was almost 23 cm tall and weighed more than one kilogram. It contained 30 circuit boards, had a talk-time of 35 minutes and took 10 hours to recharge. Cooper would later say his inspiration for that first cellphone were those chirping communicators used by Starfleet members on Star Trek.

Imagine the chirping that has been unleashed upon the world since.

In 2012 a report carried out by the International Telecommunications Union found that there were six billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide. At the time the global population was seven billion.

Forty years. Why the cellphone today is just as old as Oilers goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin. Or, if you like, Eminem. It has evolved from a talking device to a lifestyle device — taking pictures, delivering mail, disgorging music and videos, offering navigation and health-care data and merchandise pricing.

And the future? Soon, apparently, we’ll see wrist phones reminiscent of Dick Tracy and “glass” phones tapped into augmentedreality eyeglasses. Phones you don’t hold, but rather wear.

Sounds like they’re coming back full circle to that excellent shoe phone.