The mobile phone

Today mobile phones are one of the most important technological advancements in the last 10 years. For many people it is essential to own a mobile phone but there is a small minority that don’t own one. Since they were invented in the 1940’s they were pretty much the size of a brick but as time went by technology has got more advanced, thus mobile phones have got smaller in size and are capable of do pretty much anything you want. Today phones are the same size or smaller than the average chocolate bar, and are capable of taking multiple pictures and videos. Most mobile phones these days have a minimum of a 1.3 mega pixel camera but there are some that have a 5 mega pixel camera this has only happened in the last 3 years or so. The boom in the technology industry has made mobile phones also capable of, playing music, inter changeable memory cards, Bluetooth (one of the most popular and successful applications for mobile to date), pc connectivity, synchronisation and fully customised themes. This is just a portion of things you can do with today’s mobile phones.

One of the main things that have stayed the same for the last 10 years is “SMS” which means short message service, this enables the user to write a small message and send it to a desired number and the message will show up on the phone at the receiving end. This service used to be free until companies realised they could make a lot of money out of this which they did!

Later on they thought, hmm how could we utilise this even more to our advantage? Well they came up with the idea of not only sending a text message but actually sending a picture along with a bit of text as well which they could charge a bit more money for. But there was a slight flaw in this as if you wanted to receive the image you had to ring your service provider and get SMS picture messaging activated which cost you even more money. Don’t get me wrong I love texting but I find it so much easier if I just rung the person up instead.

1^st Generation

The first generation phones were the first mobile phones to be released to the Public, they used analogue circuit-switched technology with FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access). These mobile phones were very unreliable, had poor voice quality and had very poor security.

2^nd Generation

The second generation of phones scrapped the analogue idea and began using Digital displays for the first time. There was a high demand for these “new” mobile phones and companies had to come up with new ideas to handle the demands on the network especially in populated cities like London. This is where text messaging was introduced and has been popular ever since. Also caller identity was introduced to recognise who is calling you.

2.5 Generation

This generation of phones was just an enhanced version of the 2^nd gen phones but with more applications they were also the start of full color screens and provided better services which enabled some of the 2.5 gen phones to support web browsing, animated navigational maps and voice mail.

3^rd Generation

The 3^rd generation phones are the latest to date. They have a better data transfer rate and offer a larger capacity of space for music, photos and videos, if you sign up to 3 network you are able to watch TV, download music videos and surf the net for free as part of a package deal but this can be done on all mobiles just not as extensively. I forgot to mention that this generation of mobiles have advanced cameras built in for example the k800i has a flash and optical zoom which didn’t appear in the older generation this just shows how fast technology has come. Most of the 3^rd gen phones support dual band, tri band and quad band which means the phone can be used in a different country if you travel abroad. There is a lot more things that the 3r gen phones can do but this is just a rough outline of the major aspects.

4^th Generation

This generation of phones are still in development but will be designed to feature WIFI and will have an even faster data transfer rate of 200mbps they will also contain a Tv.

Few articles I found interesting.

http://www.affordablephones.net/HistoryMobile.htm

http://ieeemacau.eee.umac.mo/ieee_student/history%20of%20mobile%20phone.htm

So this is pretty much all I have to say about this, I hope some of this information will be of use to you

Thanks

Rich