Question: When was the first mobile phone released to the public?

Disambiguated questions and answers:
context: In 1949, AT&T commercialized Mobile Telephone Service. From its start in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1946, AT&T introduced Mobile Telephone Service to one hundred towns and highway corridors by 1948. Mobile Telephone Service was a rarity with only 5,000 customers placing about each week. Calls were set up manually by an operator and the user had to depress a button on the handset to talk and release the button to listen. The call subscriber equipment weighed about 
question: When did the first customers have access to mobile phones?
short_answers: 1946
wikipage: History of mobile phones
context: Prior to 1973, mobile telephony was limited to phones installed in cars and other vehicles. Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone. On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, his rival. The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Cooper weighed and measured . The prototype offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge.
question: When was the first handheld mobile phone released?
short_answers: 1973
wikipage: History of mobile phones
context: First automatic analog cellular systems deployed were NTT's system first used in Tokyo in 1979, later spreading to the whole of Japan, and NMT in the Nordic countries in 1981.
question: When were the first analog cellular systems deployed?
short_answers: 1979
wikipage: History of mobile phones
context: Advances in MOSFET power electronic technology also enabled the development of digital wireless mobile networks, which are essential to modern cell phones. The wide adoption of power MOSFET, LDMOS (lateral diffused MOS) and RF CMOS (radio frequency CMOS) devices led to the development and proliferation of digital wireless mobile networks by the 1990s, with further advances in MOSFET technology leading to increasing bandwidth during the 2000s. Most of the essential elements of wireless mobile networks are built from MOSFETs, including the mobile transceivers, base station modules, routers, RF power amplifiers, telecommunication circuits, RF circuits, and radio transceivers, in networks such as 2G, 3G, and 4G.
question: When were the first digital mobile phones released?
short_answers: 1990s
wikipage: History of mobile phones

Long-form answers:
knowledge: content: From its start in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1946, AT&T introduced Mobile Telephone Service to one hundred towns and highway corridors by 1948.
wikipage: History of mobile phones
content: On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, his rival.
wikipage: History of mobile phones
content: The first automatic analog cellular systems ever deployed were NTT's system first used in 1979 for car phones in Tokyo 
wikipage: History of mobile phones
content: In the 1990s, the 'second generation' mobile phone systems emerged.
wikipage: History of mobile phones
content: These differed from the previous generation by using digital instead of analog transmission, and also fast out-of-band phone-to-network signaling.
wikipage: History of mobile phones
long_answer: The first customers had access to mobile phones from 1946 in St. Louis, when AT&T introduced the car phone. Motorola created the first handheld mobile phone in 1973, while the first analog cellular systems were used in 1979 by NTT in Japan. The first digital mobile phones, which were the second generation mobile phone systems, emerged in the 1990s.