Cellular Phones

Thousands and thousands of people in the United States and around the world are familiar with cellular phones. With gadgets such as cellular phones, you can stay connected with your friends and family and talk with anyone anywhere on the planet. And what’s more, you can do all these from just about anywhere!

The cellular phones in the market these days have an incredible plethora of functions and gizmos. Every month or so, new functions are constantly being added to make your cell phones even more convenient to use. Truth be told, typical cellular phones nowadays can do just about anything. Depending on the cell phone model, here are some of the things you can do:

* Store contact information
* Make task or to-do lists
* Keep track of appointments and set reminders
* Use the built-in calculator for simple math
* Send or receive email
* Get information, such as news, entertainment, stock quotes from the Internet
* Play simple games
* Integrate other devices such as PDAs, MP3 players, and GPS receivers

All right, so now that we have enumerated some of the stuffs that cellular phones can do. But have you ever wondered how cellular phones work? What makes cellular phones different from regular phones?

To start with the basics, cellular phones are basically radio devices. Well, they are extremely sophisticated radio devices but radio nonetheless. The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and wireless communication came to be with the invention of the first radio by Nikolia Tesla in the 1880s. It was perhaps only natural that these two great technologies would be used together to create the cell phone.

Before the age of cellular phones, people who needed the portability of mobile-communications devices installed radio telephones in their cards. This meant that the telephone would have to have a big transmitter that’s powerful enough to transmit 40 to 50 miles. Now, for the mobile person where convenience is a must, that’s not very appealing.

The genius of cellular phones is the division of a city into small cells. This allows extensive frequency reuse across a city so that millions of people can use cellular phones simultaneously. Typical cell phones in the United States can receive about 800 frequencies to use across the city. This is indeed a big step from the radio-telephone system where only about 25 channels are afforded per city. What the cell phone carrier does is to chop up the city into hundreds of cells, each measuring about 10 square miles. Because cellular phones and base stations use low-power transmitters, the same frequencies can be reused in non-adjacent cells. This allows more people to use cellular phones without choking the frequency pathway.