Cell phone Free Encyclopedia

2006-01-23T13:13:00.000+05:30

Mobile phones from various years

A mobile phone, also known as a cell phone (cellular phone), is an electronic telecommunications device with the same basic capability as a conventional fixed-line telephone, but which is also entirely portable and is not required to be connected with a wire to the telephone network. Most current mobile phones connect instead to the network using a wireless radio wave transmission technology. The mobile phone communicates via a cellular network of base stations, also known as cell sites, which are in turn linked to the conventional telephone network.

In addition to the standard voice function of a telephone, a mobile phone can support many additional services such as SMS for text messaging, packet switching for access to the Internet, and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video.

Some of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturers include Alcatel, Audiovox, Fujitsu, Kyocera (formerly the handset division of Qualcomm), LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Panasonic (Matsushita Electric), Philips, Sagem, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens, SK Teletech, Sony Ericsson, and Toshiba.

There are also specialist communication systems related to, but distinct from mobile phones, such as satellite phones and Professional Mobile Radio. Mobile phones are also distinct from cordless telephones, which generally operate only within a limited range of a specific base station.

1 Worldwide deployment

2 Mobile phone culture

3 Mobile phone features

4 Technology

5 Controversy

6 Future prospects

7 Terminology

8 See also

9 External links

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Worldwide deployment

Mock-up of the "portable phone of the future", from a mid-60s Bell System advertisement, shows a device not too different from today's mobile telephones.

Radio phones have a long and varied history that stretches back to the 1950s, with hand-held cellular radio devices being available since 1983. Due to their low establishment costs and rapid deployment, mobile phone networks have since spread rapidly throughout the world, outstripping the growth of fixed telephony.

In most of Europe, wealthier parts of Asia and Latin America, Australia, Canada and the US, mobile phones are now widely used, with the majority of the adult, teenage, and even child population owning one. At present India and China have the largest growth rates of cellular subscribers in the world. The availability of Prepaid or pay as you go services, where the subscriber does not have to commit to a long term contract, has helped fuel this growth.

The mobile phone has become ubiquitous because of the interoperability of mobile phones across different networks and countries. This is due to the equipment manufacturers all working to the same standard, particularly the GSM standard which was designed for Europe-wide interoperability. All European nations and some Asian nations chose it as their sole standard, while in Japan and South Korea another standard, CDMA, was selected.

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Mobile phone culture

SMS message on a Sony Ericsson handset

In less than twenty years, mobile phones have gone from being rare and expensive pieces of equipment used by businesses to a pervasive low-cost personal item. In many countries, mobile phones now outnumber land-line telephones, with most adults and many children now owning mobile phones. It is not uncommon for young adults to simply own a mobile phone instead of a land-line for their residence. In some developing countries, where there is little existing fixed-line infrastructure, the mobile phone has become widespread.

With high levels of mobile telephone penetration, a mobile culture has evolved, where the phone becomes a key social tool, and people rely on their mobile phone addressbook to keep in touch with their friends. Many people keep in touch using SMS, and a whole culture of "texting" has developed from this. The commercial market in SMS's is growing. Many phones even offer Instant Messenger services to increase the simplicity and ease of texting on phones. Cellular phones in Japan, offering internet capabilities such as NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, offer text messaging via standard email.

The mobile phone itself has also become a totemic and fashion object, with users decorating, customizing, and accessorizing their mobile phones to reflect their personality. This has emerged as its own industry. The sale of commercial ringtones exceeded $2.5 billion in 2004 [1].

Mobile phone etiquette has become an important issue with mobiles ringing at funerals, weddings, movies and plays. Users often speak at increased volume, with little regard for other people nearby. It has become common practice for places like bookshops, libraries, movie theatres, and houses of worship to post signs prohibiting the use of mobile phones, sometimes even installing jamming equipment to prevent them. The US intercity passenger system Amtrak offers a "quiet car" where phone use is prohibited, much like the designated non-smoking cars in the past. Mobile phone use on aircraft is also prohibited.

Cameraphones and videophones that can capture video and take photographs are increasingly being used to cover breaking news. Stories like the London Bombings, the Indian Ocean Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina have been reported on by cameraphone users on news sites like NowPublic and photosharing sites like Flickr.

In Japan, cellular phone companies provide immediate notification of earthquakes and other natural disasters to their customers free of charge. In the event of an emergency, disaster response crews can locate trapped or injured people using the signals from their mobile phones; an interactive menu accessible through the phone's internet browser notifies the company if the user is safe or in distress.

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Mobile phone features

Main articles: Mobile phone features, and [[]], and [[]], and [[]], and [[]]

Mobile phones are often packed with features that offer users far more than just the capability to send text messages and make voice calls. These may include internet browsing, music (MP3) playback, personal organisers, email, watch/alarm, built-in cameras, ringtones, security measures (e.g. pin codes), SIM blocks, games, radio, Push to talk, infrared and bluetooth connectivity, and call registers.

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Technology

Mobile phones and the network they operate under vary significantly from provider to provider, and even from nation to nation. However, all of them communicate through electromagnetic radio waves with a base station (which can be located on top of a building or on a tower designed for the purpose). The phones have a low power transceiver that is typically designed to transmit voice and data up to a few kilometers to where the tower is located. The handset constantly listens for the nearest tower with the strongest signal. Once found, the handset informs that tower of its own unique identifier, and alerts the mobile phone network that it is ready and standing-by to receive telephone calls. This cycle is then repeated as the phone roams around the network and new towers appear in the handset's range.

Towers have high power radio transmitters which broadcast their presence, and relay communications to and from the mobile handsets. The tower is connected to the telephone network by a high-capacity link. The base station connects to the operator's backbone network and the wider public telephone network as well as the networks of other mobile phone operators.

The dialogue between the handset and the tower is a stream of digitized audio. The technology that achieves this depends on the system which the mobile phone operator has adopted. Some technologies include AMPS for analogue, and TDMA, CDMA, GSM, GPRS and UMTS for digital communications. Each network operator also has a unique radio frequency chosen from a small number of standard frequencies allocated to each technology.

Future prospects

Camera phone

There is a great deal of active research and development into mobile phone technology that is currently underway. Some of the improvements that are being worked on are:

One difficulty in adapting mobile phones to new uses is form factor. For example, ebooks may well become a distinct device, because of conflicting form-factor requirements — ebooks require large screens, while phones need to be smaller. However, this may be solved using folding e-paper or built-in projectors.

One function that would be useful in phones is a translation function. Currently it is only available in stand-alone devices, such as Ectaco translators.

An important area of evolution relates to the Man Machine Interface. New solutions are being developed to create new MMI more easily and let manufacturers and operators experiment new concepts. Examples of companies that are currently developing this technology are Digital Airways with the Kaleido product, e-sim, mobile arsenal, and Qualcomm with UIOne for the BREW environment.

Mobile phones will include various speech technologies as they are being developed. Many phones already have rudimentary speech recognition in a form of voice dialing. However, to support more natural speech recognition and translation, a drastic improvement in the state of technology in these devices is required.

New technologies are being explored that will utilize the Extended Internet and enable mobile phones to treat a barcode as a URL tag. Phones equipped with barcode reader-enabled cameras will be able to snap photos of barcodes and direct the user to corresponding sites on the Internet. This technology can be extended to RFID tags, or even snapped pictures of company logos. Searches can also be personalized to local areas using a GPS system built in to cell phones. Examples of companies that are currently developing this technology are Neomedia (via Paperclick), Mobot and Scanbuy.

Developments in miniaturised hard disks and flash drives to solve the storage space issue are already surfacing, therefore opening a window for phones to become portable music libraries and players similar to the iPod.

Developments in podcast software enables mobile phones to become podcast playback devices through existing channels like MMS Podcast, J2ME Podcast and AMR-NB Podcast.

The emergence of integration capabilities with other unlicensed access technologies such as a WiMAX and WLAN, as well as allowing handover between traditional operator networks supporting GSM, CDMA and UMTS to unlicensed mobile networks. The new standard (UMA) has been developed for this.

Further improvements in battery life will be required. Colour screens and additional functions put increasing demands on the device's power source, and battery developments may not proceed sufficiently fast to compensate. However, different display technologies, such as OLED displays, e-paper or retinal displays, smarter communication hardware (directional antennae, multi-mode and peer-to-peer phones) may reduce power requirements, while new power technologies such as fuel cells may provide better energy capacity.

Speculative improvements in the future may be inspired by an English team led by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau who in 2002 developed an implant designed to be inserted into a tooth during dental surgery. This device consists of a radio receiver and transducer, which transmits the sound via bone conduction through the jawbone into the ear. Sound is transmitted via radio waves from another device (presumably a mobile phone) and received by the implant. The implant is currently powered externally, given that no current power source is small enough to fit inside the tooth with it. In addition, the implant was only designed to receive signals, not transmit them. Directly tapping into the inner ear or the auditory nerve is already technologically feasible and will become practical as surgical methods advance.

New technology in Japan has combined the RFID chip principle into the handset and hooked it up to a network of readers and interfaces. The system, pioneered by NTT Docomo and SonyEricsson, is called Felica and there are around 10,000 convenience stores where one can now use a phone to pay for goods just by 'swiping' it over a flat reader. By charging up a phone with pre-paid cash credits, it can act as a sophisticated mobile-phone wallet. The technology is proving popular and there are now even vending machines that accept this form of payment.

The delivery of multimedia content including video to mobiles is beginning to become a reality with two main competing standards DMB - Digital Multimedia Broadcasting - and DVB-H - a handset version of the Digital Video Broadcasting standard. These methods avoid swamping the network by using traditional broadcasting.

Cell phone market set to soar in '05

2005-12-05T18:32:00.000+05:30

LONDON (Reuters) - The global mobile phone market is set to grow to 2 billion subscribers by the end of 2005, fueled by strong demand from developing economies in Asia and Latin America, Deloitte & Touche said on Tuesday.

The consulting firm said it expected voice calls to continue to be the primary driver of profits and revenues for mobile phone companies, with volumes continuing to grow steadily on the back of falling prices and rising ease of use.

Mobile penetration would surpass 100 percent in some markets as users take a second connection for data or for personal use. The mobile industry had 1.5 billion users in June last year.

"The most compelling and lucrative mobile content will continue to revolve around phone personalization, such as ring tones, real tones, wallpapers and basic games," Deloitte said in its 2005 outlook for the telecoms sector.

Traditional fixed-line operators will continue to face margin pressures because of competition from mobile and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) providers, but the vast majority of voice calls would still originate and end on their networks, the report said.

"They should focus on marketing their superior capabilities and investing in full-featured phones with key convenience features, such as stored number dialing, text messaging and conference calling, to stimulate call volume," Deloitte said.

Radio tagging

Radio tagging could become the sunrise industry this year, Deloitte said, as sectors ranging from retailing to automobiles drive up adoption of the technology to curtail theft, cut waste and improve productivity.

"In 2005, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) will finally make it out of the lab and into the commercial world ... By the end of the year, more than 10 billion RFID tags will have been sold and used," Deloitte said in its 2005 outlook for the telecoms sector.

Retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Britain's Tesco are in the midst of a drive to replace bar codes with RFID chips embedded in plastic product tags that can track goods and signal the need for restocking, boosting supply efficiency and cutting costs.

Analysts estimate this technology and subsequent cuts in manpower, with inventory control done automatically, could save Wal-Mart, which posts annual sales of about $256 billion, more than $1.3 billion a year.

Deloitte said it expected collecting, collating and presenting RFID data will become a very sizeable industry, with technology companies grabbing the lion's share of revenue.

RFID readers and other hardware could become a healthy market, and RFID applications will find use in sectors ranging from healthcare to construction and transportation, it said.

Panasonic bids farewell to the US cellphone market

They’re going out rather quietly, but Panasonic has decided to stop selling cellphones in the US. Why? Because none of the carriers will play with them, and for better or for worse, you can’t sell a significant number of phones in this country unless you’ve got a partnership with a major carrier (they’re the real customers, not us). Panasonic used to have a little something going on with AT&T Wireless, but the merger with Cingular left them out in the cold, with the new mega-carrier opting not to continue buying handsets from them. Panasonic had been giving it a go by selling handsets directly to consumers on its website, but without those carrier subsidies, it was hard for them to compete, and it sounds like they just weren’t moving enough units to justify their US operations. Too bad, because Panasonic has some mighty fine cellphones for sale in the rest of the world.

Cellphone World

Cell phone Free Encyclopedia

Contents

Worldwide deployment

Mobile phone culture

Mobile phone features

Technology

Future prospects

Cell phone market set to soar in '05

Panasonic bids farewell to the US cellphone market