Interesting Facts About Cell Phones

Cell phone (mobile phone) is a wireless, portable, long-range, electronic telephone, which in the period of travel can seamlessly change antenna links, from one radio reception cell to another radio reception cell, without dropping or losing the continuing call.

Moreover the ordinary voice function of a telephone, most modern cell phones (mobile phone) have features for example SMS for text messages, MMS for multimedia messages, radio, games, internet connectivity for email, browsing, communicating, music (MP3) playback, memo recording, fixed cameras and camcorders, ring tones, personal organizers, Push-to-Talk (PTT), Bluetooth and infrared connectivity, call registers, streaming video, downloading video, video call, and also serve as wireless modems for PCs that can be connected to the Internet.

The power in a cell phone (mobile phone) is attained from rechargeable batteries, which can be recharged from the mains, a USB port or a cigarette lighter port in an automobile. Nickel Metal Hydride were the most ordinary types of batteries, which due to the "memory effect" (the user can recharge only when the total battery is uncharged) were replaced by Lithium-Ion batteries, which didn’t endure from any memory effect.

Cell phones (mobile phone) came into existence because of the device of hexagonal cells in 1947, for the base stations by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T. This was further increased in the period of the 1960s by Bell Labs. During a call, the channel frequency couldn’t be changed automatically from one cell (base station coverage area) to a new cell (base station coverage area) as the person traveled from the region of one cell to the region of another cell. Amos Joel of Bell Labs made-up a breakthrough discovery and called it as the `call handoff` by which the channel frequency could be changed automatically from one cell to another cell, in the duration of the same call, as the mobile user traveled from one cell to another cell. Due to their deep construction, these phones were used mostly in automobiles.

The first useful cell phone in a non-vehicle setting, and which could be handheld, was made-up by Martin Cooper, the General Manager (Communications Division) of Motorola, who made the world’s first handheld cell phone (mobile phone) call on April 3, 1973.

The technology by which the cell phone (mobile phone) workings depends on the cellular phone user; however, all of them use electromagnetism radio waves, which are connected with a cell site (base station). The base station is composed of numerous antennas which are mounted on a pole, tower, or building. Cell sites are spread at a space of five to eight miles (approx. eight to thirteen km) from each other. The low power transceiver from the cell phone sends out the voice and information to the nearest cell site. In the duration of movement, the cell phones will "handoff" the data to other cell site. Mobile phone operators use lots of technologies to preserve the smooth stream of digitized information from the cell phone to the cell site and vice versa.

The wireless cell phone technologies are grouped under heads identified as generations, starting from zero generation. The present generation going on is 4G; however, there are old cell phones (mobile phone) that still work on 1G, 2G, and 3G technologies. The wireless cell phone technologies used in each generation are as given below:

0G: PTT, MTS, IMTS, AMTS, OLT, MTD, Autotel/PALM, ARP

1G: NMT, AMPS/TACS/ETACS, Hicap, CDPD, Mobitex, DataTac

2G: GSM, iDEN, D-AMPS, IS-95/cdmaOne, PDC, CSD, PHS, GPRS, HSCSD, WiDEN, CDMA2000 1xRTT/IS-2000, EDGE (EGPRS)

3G: W-CDMA, UMTS (3GSM), FOMA, TD-CDMA/UMTS-TDD, 1xEV-DO/IS-856, TD-SCDMA, GAN (UMA), HSPA, HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA+, HSOPA

4G : UMB, UMTS Revision 8 (LTE), WiMAX