Some at least sought to create that impression of importance and believed it worked. We had 2 pals bordering 40 yo with new 7 series beemers bestowed with those rather early fixed cellphones, stopping each side of the road, 5 m apart, looking at each other windows closed, and talking with each other using their phones. Rather embarrassing
I don't know whether that's a time offset or international price variation. By '96 in the UK they were becoming mainstream, and a sensible choice for university students as your number wouldn't be changing every time you moved.
Over here it was standard to take your number with you every time you moved. At least when moving within the same area code that is still possible today and everyone does it when they can.
Believe the first one I got was the Ericsson GH 198. Nokia kicked off and got extremely popular with kits, but the hardware quality was dirt poor, and when using my Nokia work phone, I always got way way better signal coverage with the Ericsson. But Ericsson struggled with shrinking...
Number portability came later here - April 1999 - and as you say it needed to be within the same area code. Most at my university were moving to different parts of the country every 6 months (thin sandwich, industrial placements) and often in shared houses, or university halls where you couldn't get a phone line installed. Once one of the mobile phone companies started offering something that wasn't priced for company expense accounts, and proved it was profitable, the others quickly followed, and students were a target market with a good fit. It probably helped that a lot of students at my university were sponsored, and getting paid for half the year, so had relatively high disposable income.
The first one I used at work was a Motorola - some MicroTAC variant with GSM and a SIM the size of a credit card. It had a pull-out antenna that looked and felt plastic although it might have had embedded metal. I don't remember it making any difference to the signal strength though, so it might just have been cosmetic. We weren't important enough to have our own - there was a pool of them to be handed out if you were working off-site and needed one. I remember the Ericssons having better reception than the Nokias when they shifted to the internal antenna, but don't remember the Nokias being unreliable otherwise, even if some of them felt a bit cheap. Proprietary charger and headset connectors are something I'm glad to have seen the back of though.
Had to be available 24/7/365 for some years, and there was always some trouble with the Nokias we got. The company had a contract for Nokias for all relevant staff, and I went out and bought for own cash to avoid Noka
I thought of them as that bad. Was well aware of the Motorolas (few years earlier), but the prices was way above the handset quality. I waited until something of better quality arrived. 
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This only happens when you're visiting some illiterate who offers no decent reading material in the bog.
That's not a warehouse fire by the way...
I was worried at the start. But by the end he didn't talk about me at all.
I like how the yt autotranscriptobot calls it Oral Knots
