Surveillance video suggests $140k Best Buy mobile cellphone heist

Surveillance video released Monday displays a weekend robbery at a Best Buy in which more than $100 worth of mobile phones were stolen. The Richland County Sheriff’s Office says it took place around 3 a.m. Saturday. Four humans stole more than a hundred and fifty phones worth around $142,000 from the commercial enterprise on Two Notch Road.

Deputies say the suspects drove away in a blue Chevy. If you have any records of the incident, call Crime Stoppers at 1-888-CRIME-SC. Cell phone technology has been moving forward at breakneck speed, and sometimes we may not notice it, but think back to just a few years ago, and you can see all the new feature integration and race in the marketplace – a race to “wow” consumers and get them to choose a specific device. But before we talk about the current trends in cell phones and smartphones, let’s discuss the past evolution of these devices. Since I had one of the first mobile “cell” phones, I’d like to tell you a quick story to start this discussion. My first cell phones were state-of-the-art at the time, but if you saw them today, you’d laugh. One of them I kept: a Mitsubishi Transportable. This phone is about the size of a six-pack cooler that you might take to your child’s soccer game, and it was pretty heavy, as I recall, it is well over 10 pounds. This, of course, included the battery pack to power up to a 3 Watt phone.

Remember that Ion-lithium batteries at the time were coming off the assembly lines and were quite expensive – they did not exist in this size for anything but NASA and military usage. I had these original cell phones that were nickel-hydride powered, quite an inferior battery technology for modern cell phones. The Mitsubishi Cell Phone has a strap on it so you can carry it like a purse, and I often felt foolish taking it until, of course, it rang, and I unzipped the top, pulled out the handset, and began talking. I can recall that everyone stared as if I was a secret CIA agent, was working for MI6, and my name wasn’t Lance; it was James Bond. You see, at that time, not very many people had cell phones, and they were costly. Another one of my first phones was an Audiovox 1000 model, which was quite large, and it was mounted in my car, a car phone-cell phone. The box that ran the Cell Phone was mounted under the seat, and a cradle held the headset. The headset had a cord on it, just like a phone at home, before the cordless phones, that is. Under the seat, the box was about 3 1/2 inches high and the size of a laptop with a 17.1-inch screen.