BATTLEFRONT 2 PUSH TO TALK FULL
BATTLEFRONT 2 PUSH TO TALK PORTABLE

The company’s roots were not with mobile phones, as it turns out, but taxi and trucking fleets. The fun part about this is that the feature actually was what the entire company was built around in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But in the time of smartphones, it fell on the back-burner-in no small part due to Sprint’s 2005 acquisition of Nextel, a $35 billion buyout which has been described as one of the worst-ever acquisitions. At a time when everyone else had a dumb phone, push-to-talk was a pretty novel feature, and it was particularly effective for logistical purposes compared to text messages or phone calls. It’s hard to forget, really.īasically, Nextel phones, generally produced by Motorola, had this function where you could press a button and use it as a walkie talkie for your group of friends or co-workers.

If you subscribed to Nextel back in the day, you probably remember what their killer feature was on their old phones. ( Varias Personas/Flickr) The quiet-but-important role that walkie-talkie communication played in the wireless revolution The Motorola i570, a notable Nextel phone. But it’s the civilian world where walkie-talkies really had a chance to shine. The sheer existence of the walkie-talkie in the 1940s likely saved a whole lot of lives. Today with the walkie-talkie, battalion headquarters can direct units over wide stretches of battlefront the way a quarterback sends his team plunging into action, and in addition the headquarters will know all the time what is developing in each area of operations. Before the walkie-talkie, battalions in today's swift moving warfare, often would be like a football team without a signals-calling quarterback because of inadequate or broken down communication lines. To infantrymen the walkie-talkie is like giving a football team a quarterback. (It wasn’t self-contained, it should be noted, as its apparatus was 35 pounds and contained in a backpack.)īut no matter who invented the device, it was pretty clear that it was a bit of a game-changer.Ī 1943 Toronto Star article describes the military advantage as such: Galvin Manufacturing, which had made its claim to fame a few years earlier with the invention of the car radio (known, of course, as the Motorola), created two notable innovations in the legacy of the two-way radio, first inventing the self-contained SCR-536 “handie-talkie” in 1940, and then creating an FM-band two-way radio technologies-first showing up in police cars in 1941 and on the battlefield in 1943. (Gross also invented the pager and wireless phone, so even if he wasn’t the outright inventor, he has other claims to success.) “Without taking anything away from Gross’ accomplishment, Hings' CM&S field radios were already in production at that time,” the Hings website states.

BATTLEFRONT 2 PUSH TO TALK PORTABLE

(He didn’t come up with the walkie-talkie term, instead calling it a “pack set.”)Ī website dedicated to Donald Hings’ memory suggests that there were examples of Hings’ invention in use as early as 1937, predating a similar invention by Canadian-American inventor Al Gross, who built his own ham radio in the early 1930s, but expressed a desire to create a portable version- which he successfully built in 1938, soon handing his idea to the U.S. Hings, an employee of a Canadian mining company who came up with the device as a way to help workers in remote areas communicate with one another. The person with the strongest case for inventing the walkie talkie, though, is perhaps Donald L. It was an idea that a lot of people had around the same time, and all added their own twist on the equation. Army, which popularized it among an audience of soldiers who used it to communicate in the field. More complicated is the question of who invented it-with credit being given to both individual inventors, Galvin Manufacturing Corporation (later known as Motorola), and the U.S. Before the cell phone, it changed the dynamic of communication into something where you could talk to someone a long distance away while still having the flexibility of mobility.Īnd it had its original moment in the sun around World War II. The portable two-way radio, eventually known as the walkie-talkie, was the perfect example of this in action.

(Of course, a lot of behind-the-scenes lobbying for spectrum followed.)

BATTLEFRONT 2 PUSH TO TALK FULL

( Wikimedia Commons) The walkie-talkie has its roots in World War IIĮarly on, radio technology was an area full of excitement, as inventors would come up with novel uses for the airwaves that would create new ways of thinking about how people interacted. A signaler with the SCR-536 walkie talkie, the first hand-held model.

Battlefront 2 push to talk