Yes, apparently the Bell System was testing a mobile phone system in 1924.
I found this photo of an early mobile phone in operation in 1924.
Sort of makes you appreciate your miniature cell phone, huh?
It looks more like a 1920’s style dea…
No! I can’t do it. 
You can find a lot of references to early mobile phones in literature and movies. I remember being surprised to see Humphrey Bogart using one in the movie Sabrina – and that was as late as 1954.
Looks more like a radio to me. Yeah, I know cell phones use radio waves, but it’s not really the same.
[Family Guy]
Can you hear me now, Cornelius?.. Good."
[/Family Guy]
Looks like somehing Doc Savage would use to track down the bad guys.
I don’t think the word “mobile” is really appropriate to that phone.
It’s rarely remembered now, but before there were cell phones there were “car phones”, which were expensive, owned by relatively few people, and completely tied to one’s car. Steven Wright, the comedian, even had a joke about how he would like to have an answering machine for a car phone that said, “I’m sorry, I’m home now, but when I’m out again I’ll call you.” Then, in the eighties era of yuppie awareness, there was a song in which some jerk “has a bitchen car phone, he thinks he owns the road”.
I’m sure that for the limo-owning class, car phones go back beyond the time of the movie Sabrina.
Boy, if that ain’t the ultimate argument for banning people from talking on their cell phones while driving, I don’t know what is…
I suppose it could be more like a modern cell phone if there was a big Victrola horn attached to it, with a cylinder record ready to play the owner’s personalized ring-tone song…
My grandfather was a telecommunications boffin in the mid twentieth century and he was in communications and signalling in WWII. Starting off as a linesman, he rose to become a senior figure in the government-monopolised Australian telco industry which was actually part of the post office then (he was a key figure in the replacement of operator-assisted long distance calls with direct dialling). Because of his position, he was able to get his hands on a car phone to give my mum a birthday greeting on her 21st birthday in 1956. According to her, the call was much like many of the calls yuppies would make three decades later: Hello! I. am. calling. from. a. CAR PHONE! [sub]Oh yeah, and happy birthday.[/sub]
I remember seeing an episode of the wonderfully cheesy Professionals (a British late 70s action TV show) in which Gordon Jackson, playing whats-his-name, used a car phone. The thing sat in the middle of the back seat, and looked just like a household phone of the same era with a big dog’s bone type of reciever.
In the 1930s, the Italians flirted with a land line car phone technology which involved driving up to a car phone “station” and plugging in, drive-in movie style.
And let’s not forget Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone.