“Without taking anything away from Gross’ accomplishment, Hings' CM&S field radios were already in production at that time,” the Hings website states. (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.) ( 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. ĭuring a recent conversation I had with Nicole Herskowitz, who currently leads product marketing for Microsoft Teams, she shared what drove Microsoft to add these new PTT capabilities to Teams and why collaborating with Zebra to bring Walkie Talkie to market to Zebra mobile computers was important to our joint customers.A signaler with the SCR-536 walkie talkie, the first hand-held model. You can read more about which Zebra mobile computers will now support the Teams Walkie Talkie app, along with how our Reflexis Workforce Scheduler can now connect to the Teams Shifts app, here. More front-line workers use Zebra devices in their day-to-day workflows than any other, and they are now using these devices to run more apps than ever before. One popular application gaining significant traction on the front line is Microsoft Teams, and we have worked with Microsoft to optimize the experience using Teams (and specifically, its Walkie Talkie feature) on our industry-leading Android mobile computers. We continue to innovate and acquire new software solutions and partner with software solution providers to ensure every asset and worker at the edge is visible, connected and fully optimized. Zebra provides a full set of devices, software applications and partnerships with leading solution providers to bring this vision to life in a way that is truly unmatched in the industry. For example, our premium Workforce Connect ™ software platform enables you to use location data to facilitate presence-based push-to-talk (PTT), messaging and data communications among workers on a Zebra mobile computer or some other Android™ or iOS mobile device. You can even integrate Workforce Connect with PBX for a secure, full telephony solution that makes it easy for workers to connect with colleagues, partners and customers using a single, unified mobility solution. And our robust Reflexis software suite puts task and workforce management at the fingertips of front-line associates. That’s why Zebra has long engineered digital collaboration tools that close the communication and information gaps for front-line workers with a “single pane of glass” that enables them to clock in, manage their task lists, communicate and collaborate with one another, and quickly address customer needs. Increasingly, our customers tell us they want to shift from putting these capabilities into the hands of a subset of their workers (as they have in the past) to empowering their entire front-line workforce with modern digital tools. Technology is a necessity for front-line workers, but they shouldn’t need to worry about whether they’re using the right mobile device or app for each task they’re assigned.
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