Way back when (when I worked at Sears in Brand Central, the electronics department (in the early 90s)), one of the big selling points for car phones vs hand-held cell phones was that car phones had better coverage because they had more power (6 watts vs 3 watts, IIRC).
And the reason car phones had more power was the handset (yes, they had handsets!) was separate from the body of the phone. And they were safer to use than hand-helds. Another big selling point.
But… are cell phones really bad for us?
Glenn Fleishman posted on that issue today on TidBITS. He starts out:
Can cell phones or Wi-Fi give you cancer? The answer is reasonably definitive: No. That’s equally true for new 5G cellular networks currently being rolled out worldwide, all previous cellular networks, and all versions of Wi-Fi.
Decades of research make it clear that the use of wireless networking, whether through mobile phones or Wi-Fi devices, carries with it no elevated risk for cancers or other diseases in humans. Some studies with rodents have garnered attention, but in a recent much-cited one that delivered a mix of results, some rats lived longer under high exposure to cellular signals than their control group counterparts.
PYBT for the whole article: Worried about 5G and Cancer? Here’s Why Wireless Networks Pose No Known Health Risk. The comments are also interesting.
