CellPhone Basics
A cellphone, Mobile Phone or mobile is an electronic device used for mobile telecommunications, mobile telephone, text messaging or data transmission, over a cellular network of specialized base stations known as cell sites.
Cellphones or mobiles differ from cordless telephones, which only offer telephone service within limited range, e.g. within a home or an office, through a fixed line and a base station owned by the subscriber and also from satellite phones and radio telephones.
As opposed to a radio telephone, a cellphone or mobile offers full duplex communication, automates calling to and paging from, a public land mobile network , and handover during a phone call when the user moves from one cell base station coverage area to another.
Most current Cell Phones connect to a cellular network consisting of switching points and base stations or cell sites, owned by a mobile network operator.
In addition to the standard voice function, current mobile phones may support many additional services, and accessories, such as SMS for text messaging, email, packet switching for access to the Internet, Gaming, Bluetooth, infrared, camera with video recorder and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video, MP3 player, radio and GPS.
The International Telecommunication Union estimated that mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide would reach approximately 4.6 billion by the end of 2009.
There are several categories of mobile phones, from basic phones to feature phones such as musicphones and cameraphones.
There are also smartphones, the first smartphone was the Nokia 9000 Communicator in 1996 which incorporated PDA functionality to the basic cellphone at the time.
As miniaturisation and increased processing power of microchips has enabled ever more features to be added to mobiles, the concept of the smartphone has evolved, and what was a high-end smartphone two years ago, is a standard phone today.
Several phone series have been introduced to address a given market segment, such as the Rim Blackberry focusing on enterprise/corporate customer email needs or the SonyEricsson Walkman series of musicphones and Cybershot series of cameraphones, not to be outdone, Nokia has it's Nseries of multimedia phones plus there is the Palm Pre the Htc Dream and the unmistakeable Apple Iphone which is shortly to undergo another transformation to incorporate advertising inside it's many applications or apps.