Mobile phone

A mobile phone, or a cellular or cell phone, is a portable telephone that uses radio waves to communicate wirelessly, without the need to be connected to a physical network. This allows the device to remain functional when the user is moving about. Cell phones use radio waves to send and receive signals. When callers speak, their phones convert their voices into electronic signals, which are carried by radio waves to the nearest cell tower. The tower then relays the radio waves to the person on the other line, whose phone converts it back to sound.

Manufacturers began experimenting with mobile telephone technology just after World War II (1939–45), but the first public display of a call made from a mobile phone did not occur until the early 1970s. Technology for mobile phones has advanced significantly since its inception, and placing or receiving a phone call is no longer a cell phone's only function. Also known as smartphones, modern cell phones allow people to send and receive text messages and emails, search the internet, run computer applications, take high-quality digital photos, and download and play music and videos. Most mobile phones are also equipped with global positioning system (GPS) technology, which allows for assistance with navigation.

Brief History

Electronics engineer John Francis Mitchell played a significant role in early cell phone development. While working as Motorola's portable products chief engineer, he and his creative team filed the first patent for portable cell phones in 1973. In this year, Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first cell phone call outside the New York Hilton hotel. Motorola introduced one of the first commercial cell phones in 1983. The DynaTAC 8000x was more than twelve inches long and weighed almost two pounds. It sold at a cost of nearly $4,000. Mitchell and his team continued to work on wireless, portable technology.

At the time, Motorola was a major producer of mobile car phones; however, the technology still required the power of a car's running engine to function. The first car phone appeared in 1910, when engineer Lars Magnus Ericsson from Stockholm, Sweden, installed a telephone in his car. To make calls, Ericsson would connect his phone to telephone poles he spotted along the road with a pair of long electrical wires. As cell towers started to get developed in the 1940s and 1950s, the concept of the car phone became more popular. It reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. Car phones in that era drew their power from the car's battery and used signals that attached to telephone networks. Later, this would come to be known as Zero G technology. By the end of the 1990s, the car phone was all but a thing of the past.

Early 1G technology became commercially viable in the early 1980s, first in Europe and later in the United States. Nordic countries including Sweden, Norway, and Finland were among the early adopters of 1G cellular service. The technology, however, was not without its problems. Limited frequencies could only support one caller at a time, and interference was a constant challenge. Second-generation technology, or 2G, was introduced in the early 1990s. This allowed for limited adaptation of data services, such as paging, faxing, text messaging, and voice mail, and the use of limited graphics.

The 3G revolution, which began to emerge in the early 2000s, allowed mobile customers to use audio, graphics, and video applications. One of the main objectives behind 3G was to standardize global networks instead of relying on different standards adopted in Europe, the United States, and other regions. Data can move on 3G networks at speeds of two megabits per second, but only under optimal conditions. The 3G network was the first network that had the capability to stream video, but network bottlenecks and overuse put much strain on the infrastructure. 4G technology surpassed 3G to become the industry standard. The enhanced data capabilities of 4G networks allowed for high-speed video streaming, video conferencing, and other web-browsing capabilities standard to today's smartphones. By 2022, 5G had emerged as 4G's successor and provided faster speeds and larger bandwidth when compared to the previous generation.

Topic Today

By the early 2020s, Samsung had emerged as the leading manufacturer of smartphones, with 19 percent of the global smartphone market share in 2024. Apple was in second place, with a 17 percent market share, followed by Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi. That same year, there were an estimated 17.7 billion mobile phones in use worldwide, which means the technology has penetrated almost all of global society—even the developing world. In the US, 98 percent of American adults owned a cellphone in 2024, according to the Pew Research Center, and 91 percent of those had smartphones.

In particularly remote regions, landline telephone infrastructure was never fully implemented, making cellular technology a more cost-effective alternative. The devices themselves have also changed dramatically since the first car phones of the 1970s and 1980s. Early cell phones were heavy and incredibly expensive, and car phones needed to draw power from the vehicles' engines in order to be used. Today's cell phones are handheld computers that can run almost any type of software. They have almost as much memory, if not more, than a full-sized desktop or laptop computer.

The iPhone, released in 2008, was a game-changer for consumers of mobile phones because it rapidly shifted expectations of what the devices should feature. The iPhone, modeled in design after the company's popular iPod MP3 players, was one of the first devices to feature touchscreen technology, which replaced the keyboards that were necessary on early smart devices, such as the Blackberry.

Over time, smartphones have largely replaced other technologies such as fax machines and digital cameras. Modern smartphones have evolved into mobile media devices, making large high-definition screens a necessity for most consumers. Additionally, the rise of the 4G network, and subsequent implementation of 5G, rendered many legacy technologies obsolete. Major cell phone carriers including AT&T and T-Mobile have all but retired all models and services that are incompatible with anything older than 3G technology, forcing many users of older phones to replace their devices. Meanwhile, in the early 2020s, researchers began to experiment with 6G technology to keep up with the demands of an ever-growing population of cell phone users.

Bibliography

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