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A Mobile Telephone (also known as a Cellular Telephone or simply a 'cell phone') is defined as a
'portable electronic device for the purpose of telecommunications over long distances'. Which
boils down to 'a telephone you can roam freely with'. Most current mobile phones actaully
connect to a cellular networi of base stations (the cell sites themselves) which overlap to yield
coverage and which also link to the standard landline public switched telephone network. It
should be noted that mobile phones are distinct from household cordless telephones which
generally operate only within range of a dedicated base station (though the distinction is blurring
with mobile phones that can link via bluetooth to a home internet base station).

It should be noted, however, that the term mobile phone can refer to any type of mobile
telephony device and also includes satellite phones and radio phones. In contrast cell(ular)
phones refers only to those mobile phones that function via cellular base stations. Despite these
distinctions, in common parlance the terms are used almost interchangeably.

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The history of the mobile phone actually goes back quite a long way. Indeed, the immediate
precursor of the modern mobile phone could be considered to be the radio telephone developed
for battlefield communications during the Second World War. Indeed what's now considered as
the  (zeroth generation) of mobile telephones were introduced. Systems such as the c

 
  used a VHF radio system to link the telephone directly to the PSTN landline
system. The problems with these systems were a combination of network congestion and
interference and it was the problem of network congestion that ultimately led to the search for a
replacement system. In 1947 the modern concept of using hexagonal 'cells' as mobile phone base
stations was invented by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T though the concept had to wait until the
1960s before serious development began.

A major breakthrough cam in 1970 when Amos Joel of Bell Laboratories solved the problem of
how a call could be maintained as an user moved from the range of one cell (technically the

  ) to the next and the next. This problem is one that's termed the 'handover'
and what Amos Bell invented was the 'call handoff' feature. This allowed users to roam freely
between any number of cells, allowing mobile telephony to be used in long-distance journeys
and the first mobile phones were fitted in vehicles as car phones.

It is generally accepted that the first truly portable 'modern' mobile phone was invented by
Martin Cooper of Motorola Corp in 1973 and he made the first call on this handheld device on
April 3rd and thus changed our world forever. However, it wasn't for a further eight years that
NMT ( c
  or  c
  , Nordic Mobile Telephone in
rnglish) introduced the first fully-automatic cellular telephone system. The father of this system
(and of the modern mobile telephone symstem is considered to be Östen Mäkitalo). This system
led directly to the ^ (first generation) of mobile phones introduced from the middle to the late
1980s. Because of power requirements and poor battery performance these cellular telephones
were still to large and bulky to be properly hand-held devices and most were still fitted as
permanent in-car devices. 1G mobile telephones use analogue signals to connect the telephone to
a base station though the base station network itself communicates digitally from one base
station to the next.

^ 
The image above shows the evolution of the mobile phone from the early so-called 'bricks' to the
latest hand-held devices of 2007. The technologies that led to this revolution in telephone design
and performance include increased miniturization, improvements in signal strength and, above
all, huge advances in battery technology.

 
Following the ^ standard, above, came the  specification. Most of the world has
standardized on TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) with the most well-known version
being GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) whereas the Americas have both
TDMA-based and CDMA-based (Code division multiple access) systems. 2G ststems use digital
communications between the handset and the base station which increases the overall system
capacity as data can be compressed and multiplexed. Also, digital systems emit less radio power
from the handsets, meaning that cells can be smaller so more cells can be positioned in the same
overall space. And the more cells you have, the more capacity you have.

Of course, use of lower power by the phones mean that phone batteries last much longer. Also,
digital encoding signal allowed error checking to be built into the handset so that noise levels
could be reduced. Digital handsets could also be employed to transmit and receive digital data,
allowing internet access from handsets and the transmission of SMS (Short Message Service)
text messages and emails. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that 2G phones are far more
secure than their 1G predecessors. Indeed, the ^ phone had no protection whatsoever against
eavesdropping and it was possible to 'clone' (clectronically duplicate) a phone's settings so that
more than one telephone could bear the same number. Despite this,  telephones are not as
secure as they could be and it is still possible to hack into these telephones.

As always, where there are advantages to digital-based 2G systems there are also disadvantages.
These are most apparent in rural errors where the weeker digital signal may not be sufficient to
reach a more distant cell tower. Analogue signals have a smooth decay curve, so even though the
quality of a transmission decreases with decreased signal strength and the call becomes noisier
and more garbled it is still possible to have an intelligible conversation at very low signal
strengths. Digital's strenght, that of clear calls, is also it's weakness in that when the signal
strength decreases somewhat (and an analogue user might experience static) the digital user may
notice occasional dropouts. If the signal strength falls further the digital signal may fail totally as
dropouts become dropped or unintelligible calls. This is because the signal curve for a digital
phone is stepped rather than being a smooth curve so you only have to decrease slightly in signal
strength to have a very dramatic drop in quality.

It should also be noted that digital telephones utilize compression to maximize both data
througput and data densities at and with base stations. But compression always degrades the
original data, inducing losses and it signal strength is low then this can significantly impair call
quality.

The vast majority of today's mobile telephones adhere to the 2G standard, or it's immediate
successor, the 2.5G system.

 
In effect the 2.5G system (second and a half system) is a direct extension of 2G where features
such as packet-switched connection and enhanced data rates and these networks support WAP,
MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), SMS mobile games, and search and directory but they
exclude rDGr (rnhanced Data GSM rnvironment) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)
technologies. The reality is that most non-3G telephones sold today adhere to 2.5G standards and
technologies rather than 2G and texting services such as SMS, MMS and picture messaging have
become standard features of mobile telephones. In most cases 2.5G is seen as a stepping stone to
3G networks.

[ 
[ is the third generation of mobile telephony technology. Like broadband for landlines, 3G
technology the simultaneous of both voice date (the call itself) and non-voice data (text, video,
email, web browsing and instant messaging). In this context it has long been thought that video
telephony would be the killer aplication that would drive the sales of 3G systems. For most of the
world (apart from the USA) 3G services are delivered on separate parts of the radiofrequency
spectrum to 2G. This meant that 3G operators had to license new regions of the spectrum and
had to build new cellular networks to work separately on these frequences. This has significantly
driven-up the price of 3G licenses and has delayed the worldwide rollout of the technology. A
notable exception being Japan where by 2005 almost 40% of subscribers were already on 3G
only networks and in 2006 upgrade from 2G to 3G was complete. Japan also shows that the true
killer app for 3G wasn't video calls, as the pundits expected; rather, it was the downloading of
music.

In rurope, 3G operators were given a boos when the rU council suggested that 3G operations
should cover 80% of the ruropean population by the end of 2005. 3G is slowly entering other
markets with the greatest growth, as of 2007 being in the emerging African markets.

   [
As compared with 2G systems, 3G systems have the capacity to support larger numbers of voice
and data centres (most especially in crowded urban centres where base stations are at a premium)
as well as supporting higher data-transfer rates. And all this is supported at a lower per-unit cost
that 2G.

Again, as compared with 2G the 3G systems utilize a 5 MHz channel carrier that allows costs to
be optimized whilst giving a very high speed of data transfer. This also allows the transfer of 385
kbi/s for mobile systems and up to 2Mbi/s for stationary systems. Because 3G handsets have
improved spectrum efficiency and the system has greater capacity. This should allow 3G users to
access global roaming between different 3G networks.

As of 2007 a new standard, High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) (Sometimes known
as High-Speed Downlink Protocol Access) (often called 3.5G) is being implemented which
allows for data transfer at 3.6 Mbi/s with an allowance of 30 Gb of data per month per user.