What Is a Cellphone?

And why are cellphones called cellphones?

A cellphone is any portable telephone which uses cellular network technology to make and receive calls. The name comes from the cell-like structure of these networks. There is some confusion about cellphones being a different thing to smartphones, but technically, every mobile phone, from the latest Android handset to the simplest feature phone, is a cellphone. It is all about the technology used to transmit your calls, rather than what the handset itself can or cannot do. As long as a phone can transmit a signal to a cellular network, it is a cellphone.

The term ‘cellphone’ is interchangeable with the terms Cellular Phone and Mobile Phone. They all mean the same thing. The term smartphone has come to mean a cellphone which offers more advanced features than just calls, SMS messages, and basic organizer software. Often, when talking about mobile phones, cellphone is used to describe a simple feature phone, whilst smartphone is used to describe more advanced touchscreen phones.

The first commercially available cellphone was developed by Motorola between 1973 and 1983 and went on sale in the U.S. early in 1984. This huge 28 ounce (790 gram) cellphone, called the DynaTAC 8000x, cost $3995.00 and needed to be charged after just thirty minutes of use. The DynaTAC 8000x is almost unrecognizable as a cellphone when compared to the devices we use today. It is estimated that there were over 5 billion cell phones in use at the end of 2012.

Why Are They Called Smartphones?

Cellular Networks

A cellular network, which gives cellphones their name, is made up of cellular masts or towers distributed across the country in a grid-like pattern. Each mast covers a relatively small region of the grid, usually around ten square miles, called a Cell. Large mobile phone carriers (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile, etc.,) erect and use their own cellular masts and therefore have control over the level of cellular coverage they can provide. Several such masts can be located on the same tower.

When you make a call on a cellphone, the signal travels through the air to the nearest mast or tower and is then relayed to a switching network and finally on to the handset of the person you are calling via the mast closest to them. If you are making a call whilst traveling, in a moving vehicle, for example, you may quickly move from the range of one cell tower to the range of another. No two adjoining cells use the same frequency, so as to avoid interference, but the transition between cellular mast areas will normally be seamless.

Cellular Coverage

In some countries, cellular coverage is available almost anywhere if you are with one of the large national carriers. In theory anyway. As you might expect, cellular coverage in built-up areas is usually better than in more rural areas. Areas where there is little or no coverage are normally places where there is poor access, or areas where there is little benefit to the cell carriers (sparsely populated areas, for example). If you are thinking of changing your carrier, it is certainly worth checking to see what their coverage is like in your local area.

Cellular masts in built-up areas such as cities are often quite close together, sometimes as little as a few hundred feet, because buildings and other structures can interfere with the signal. In open areas, the distance between masts can be several miles as there is less to disrupt the radio waves. If the cellular signal is just very weak (rather than non-existent), it is possible for consumers to buy a cellular repeater or network extender, both of which can amplify and boost a weak signal.

The History Behind the Invention of the First Cell Phone

Like many inventions, the first cell phone was born out of an intense desire to beat the other person to the patent office.

While cell phones are a fairly modern invention — if you consider 1973 modern — the idea of a telephone that could travel with you is as old as the telephone itself. For decades though, the best anyone could offer were bulky, two-way radio devices that were essentially walkie-talkies that filled the trunk of your car. However, a couple of key engineering developments and a classic tale of American business rivalry would help lay the foundation for the device that revolutionized the way people communicate.

Earliest Mobile Communications Devices

Since the turn of the 20th century, people have envisioned a world where they would be able to have a means of communication with each other continuously, free from the restricting wires and cables. With the introduction of radio communications in the early 1900s, and the introduction of landline telephone services, it wasn’t hard to see why people would think that the invention of real mobile phones as we know them today would happen much sooner than it did.

For most of their history, «mobile» phones were mostly two-way radios that you installed on something that moved. In the 1920s, German railroad operators began testing wireless telephones in their train cars, starting with military trains on a limited number of lines, before spreading to public trains a few years later.

In 1924, Zugtelephonie AG was founded as a supplier of mobile telephone equipment for use in trains, and the following year saw the first public introduction of wireless telephones for first-class passengers on major rail lines between Berlin and Hamburg.

The Second World War saw major advances in radio technology, with handheld radios coming into widespread use. These advances placed mobile radio systems in military vehicles around the same time, but technological limitations limited the quality of the systems significantly.

A decade of evolution of mobile phones, from a 1994 Motorola 8900X-2 to the 2004 HTC Typhoon. Source: Anders/Wikipedia

This didn’t stop companies from offering mobile telephone systems designed for use in automobiles in the 1940s and 1950s in America and elsewhere. However, like their military counterparts, they came with serious drawbacks. They were large systems that required a lot of power, had limited coverage, and the networks weren’t able to support more than a few active connections at a time. These limitations would hamper mobile phone technology for decades and put a ceiling on how fast the technology could be adopted by the public.

Major Developments Towards Modern Mobile Phone Systems

In response to this growing demand for better mobile telephony, AT&T’s Bell Labs went to work developing a system for placing and receiving telephone calls inside automobiles that allowed for a greater number of calls to be placed in a given area at the same time.

They introduced their mobile service in 1946, which AT&T commercialized in 1949 as the Mobile Telephone Service. The service was slow to take off, however, with only a few thousand customers in about 100 localities in total. The system required an operator at a switchboard to set up a connection and the users had to push a button to talk and let go of it to listen, making it more like a military radio than the existing telephone system that people were used to.

The service was also expensive, and the number of channels available for active connections remained limited to as little as three channels in some places, and with a conversation taking up the entire channel for the duration of the call, there could never be more active conversations than there were available channels.

Bell Labs engineers were working on a new system that would improve the efficiency of these channels in the 1940s. However, Douglas Ring and W. Rae Young proposed the idea of a network of ‘cells’ to help manage the reuse of channels and reduce interference as early as 1947. The technology just wasn’t there at the time, however, and it would be another couple of decades before a pair of Bell Labs engineers, Richard Frenkiel and Philip Porter, would build out this concept of cells into a more detailed plan for a mobile telephone network for automobiles. By this time, AT&T had already pushed the Federal Communications Commission to make more of the frequency spectrum available for radiotelephones, providing more channels for them to use.

Other significant developments in the 1970s enabled automatic cell switching and signaling systems that allowed for devices to maintain a connection as they moved from one cell to another, expanding the area that mobile telephone networks could service. But all of these developments were put to use developing mobile phones in automobiles. It would take an upstart to give us the first hand-held cell phone, as we know it today.

Motorola’s Martin Cooper Invents The First Cell Phone

While Bell Labs was working to develop the system that would become the cellular networks we are all familiar with, they weren’t having as much success in building an actual portable, handheld telephone. They had spent much of their efforts developing what we used to call the car phone. Though not anymore, since those aren’t really a thing now that everyone has hand-held phones.

The reason we don’t all have car phones today was because of the work of a small company called Motorola, and a man named Marty Cooper.

“We believed people didn’t want to talk in cars and that people wanted to talk to other people, ” Cooper told the BBC in a 2003 interview, “and the only way we at Motorola, this little company, could prove this to the world was to actually show we could build a cellular telephone, a personal telephone.”

Build it they did. With encouragement from his boss, Motorola’s chief of portable communication products John Mitchell, Cooper, and the engineers at Motorola produced the working prototype for the first cell phone. On April 3, 1973, before stepping into a news conference in Manhattan to demonstrate the new device that would go on to revolutionize communications, Cooper tested it by placing the first public cellular phone call in history.

“I called my counterpart at Bell Labs, Joel Engel,” Cooper said, “and told him: ‘Joel, I’m calling you from a “real” cellular telephone. A portable handheld telephone.’”

Beating AT&T to the punch was a thrilling experience for the upstart Motorola. They had taken on a company that at that time exercised monopoly power over American telephone systems.

“When you are a competitive entity like we were,” Cooper said, “it’s one of the great satisfactions in life.

The Invention of the Cell Phone Was a Multi-Generational Effort

While demonstrated in 1973, it would be another decade of development before Motorola’s cell phone — the world’s first — made it to market, and commercial cellular service for handheld cell phones began. Selling for about $3,500 at the time, no one — not even Cooper — saw Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000x as the first step towards a communications revolution to come.

“I have to confess that [the widespread global use of cell phones] would have been a stretch at the time and in 1983 those first phones cost $3,500, which is the equivalent of $7,000 today,” Cooper said in 2003. “But we did envision that someday the phone would be so small that you could hang it on your ear or even have it embedded under your skin.”

As for whether Cooper accepted the title given to him by history, Father of the Cell Phone, he felt that the honor should be shared. “Even though I conceived of it,” he said, “it really took teamwork, and literally hundreds of people ended up creating the vision of what cellular is today, which by the way is not complete. We are still working on it and still trying to make it better.”

For a more comprehensive look at the history behind the cell phone, you can also check out our video below.

Smartphone

A smartphone is a cell phone that allows you to do more than make phone calls and send text messages. Smartphones can browse the Internet and run software programs like a computer. Smartphones use a touch screen to allow users to interact with them. There are thousands of smartphone apps including games, personal-use, and business-use programs that all run on the phone. The picture is an example of the Apple iPhone, one of the most popular smartphones available today.

What can a smartphone do?

Smartphones are loaded with features and capabilities that make them more than a phone. Below is a listing of the most popular features of a smartphone.

• Make and receive phone calls text messages.
• Take, show, and store pictures and video.
• Browse the Internet, and send and receive e-mail.
• GPS capability for location and navigation.
• Record and play audio and music.
• Display time and date and other functions such as alarm clock, stopwatch, and timer.
• Display weather and temperature information.
• Voice dictation and take notes.
• Virtual assistant using Siri, Google Assistant, or Cortana.
• Access utilities, such as a flashlight, e-book reader, and calculator.

More advanced smartphones are now foldable, which enables them to change between that standard smartphone and tablet screen sizes. For example, the Huawei Mate X can unfold to provide an 8-inch screen.

Does a smartphone have an operating system?

Yes. Similar to a desktop or laptop computer, a smartphone has an operating system on it, like Windows or macOS. The four most common are iOS (created by Apple), Android (created by Google), BlackBerry (created by Research In Motion), and Windows Phone (created by Microsoft).

Can I change my smartphone operating system?

You can update the version of a smartphones operating system. However, you cannot change a smartphones operating system. For example, you cannot install iOS on an Android phone.

What type of storage medium is used in a smartphone?

Smartphones use flash memory to store apps and data. The flash memory is usually built into the phone and non-removable. Some smartphones may also have a flash memory card slot, often designed for an SD card, allowing users to utilize external storage.

When was the first smartphone released?

The first unofficial smartphone was developed by IBM in 1992. It was a prototype device, with PDA-like features, including maps, news feeds, and stock quotes. The prototype resulted in an improved version being released to the market in 1994, called the Simon Personal Communicator. This device was the first official smartphone, with capabilities to send and receive e-mails, and included apps like an address book, calculator, calendar, and a notepad.

The invention of the smartphone should not be confused with the invention of the cellphone in 1973.