Future of Cell Phones

What's Next: Speed Is Just the Beginning

Today's mobile phones can already send e-mail, browse the Web, and keep you in touch with friends and colleagues via voice or text message. Tomorrow's handsets will add even more to the menu, morphing (as needed) into always-connected portable game consoles, full-featured TVs, and credit cards. Here's a quick look at what's coming:

Networks: In the next few years, cell phone networks will move data at several megabits per second, and will coexist with WiMax, Wi-Fi, and, for TV, DVB-H or MediaFLO. IMS will let them work together.

Handsets: Look for sleek designs (such as Frog Design's Ubik), better battery life, e-payment support, and graphics muscle for true TV and console-style video gaming.

Cameras: Expect not just high resolutions (8 megapixels and beyond), but also the same image-processing capabilities found in current digital still and video cameras.

Network Hopping: Enabling Seamless Internet Access
GSM, CDMA, Wi-Fi, WiMax: Can't we all just get along? With IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), we just might. Now in trials, IMS network technology will allow any type of packet data--voice calls, video, music, HTML, you name it--to move seamlessly between IMS-enabled networks. With IMS, you'll be able to start a call on your cell phone and end it on a VoIP landline, watch pay TV on either a handset or a big screen (smart-card technology identifies you), and access your contacts from any connected PC or handset. But the benefits will kick in only once IMS is widely deployed, which will take several years.

Tomorrow's Phone: Fold It and Go

Artwork: Courtesy of Frog Designs Many of today's hot new phones started out as just a glimmer in an industrial designer's eye. The most successful of these new designs are picked up by handset manufacturers and eventually offered to you by your cell phone service provider.

We asked Frog Design, the Silicon Valley industrial design and consulting firm with clients as diverse as Victoria's Secret, Maxtor, and Yahoo Music, what a cell phone might look like several years from now. They shared with us this innovative prototype design. Click on the image to see more features.

Nokia E7 - silver white

The good: The Nokia E7 boasts a premium design and has a fantastic QWERTY keyboard. The smartphone's 8-megapixel camera takes excellent pictures and video. Battery life is also good.
The bad: The Symbian platform falls short of the competition, and the phone can be sluggish. The E7 has a lower-resolution display and doesn't have an expansion slot.
The bottom line: The Nokia E7 has some wonderful qualities, like great hardware and excellent battery life, but ultimately its inferior software trips up this business-oriented smartphone.


If you've been a cell phone fan for a while, you might remember the days when the Nokia Communicator series was the status symbol of a powerful businessperson. Nokia eventually developed the line into the E series, and its latest flagship model, the Nokia E7, is available now for an unlocked price of $650. The company has done a lot to refine the design, and it's running the revamped Symbian 3 operating system. However, a lot has changed since the days of the Communicator. Does the E7 have the chops to make it in the business world? Read on to find out.

Design

The Nokia E7 takes a number of style cues from the Nokia N8, which isn't a bad thing in our view since we loved the N8's hardware. The E7 is made of the same high-quality materials--aluminum body and glass AMOLED display--giving it a very premium feel. It's slightly bigger and heavier than the N8 at 4.87 inches tall by 2.46 inches wide by 0.54 thick and 6.2 ounces, but considering that the E7 also manages to fit in a full QWERTY keyboard, it's actually pretty amazing that it's only 0.03 inch thicker and 0.1 inch longer than the N8.




The E7's glass touch screen measures 4 inches diagonally and has a 640x360-pixel resolution. In general, it's clear and bright and you'll have no problem reading what's on the screen. However, with a lower-resolution screen, you're not going to get the same sharpness or definition as on today's qHD, Super AMOLED, and retina displays. The pixels are more visible on the E7, so images and text don't look quite as smooth.
On the bright side, the touch screen is very responsive. Launching apps only required a single tap, and we were able to navigate through the various screens and menus with no problem. There are three home screens in total, which you can customize with various widgets and shortcuts, and the main menu of apps is presented in a simple grid format.
Of course, as we've stated before in our reviews of the N8 and the Nokia Astound, Symbian 3 brings a one-touch user interface that makes it much easier to navigate these phones than previous versions of the operating system. However, it still feels clunky in some parts compared with platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, so Symbian certainly isn't leapfrogging the competition.



For text entry, you get an onscreen keyboard, though in portrait mode you only get an alphanumeric keypad. It's not as big of a deal as it was on the Nokia N8, since the E7 offers a full, physical QWERTY keyboard. To access it, you simply push the screen aside. The sliding mechanism is smooth and the hinge feels sturdy. The screen securely locks into place and sits at a slight angle to make it easier to see when using the keyboard.
Nokia did a really nice job with the keyboard. The buttons are a decent size with good spacing and a comfortable layout. The space bar is centrally located and not off to the side as on the Nokia N97 Mini, so in general we were able to type at a good clip with minimal mistakes.
There are a handful of other controls on the smartphone. Just below the display, there's a menu button. The left side features a lock switch and on the right side you'll find the SIM card slot, a volume/zoom key, and a camera button. Like the N8, the E7 doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, so you insert the SIM card on the side. However, we initially had a rather difficult time pulling out the SIM card tray, and after about 20 minutes we finally pried it open with a sharp object. Also, the slider volume controls take a bit of getting used to; we found it easier to use a rocker control to adjust audio while on a call, but this is really a minor issue.



The top of the phone houses the 3.5mm headphone jack, power button, HDMI port, and Micro-USB port. Note that there is no expansion slot on the E7. Last but not least, the 8-megapixel camera and dual LED flash are on the back, and the front-facing VGA camera is located above the display in the upper left corner.
The Nokia E7 comes packaged with an AC adapter, a USB cable, a wired stereo headset, an HDMI cable, a Micro-USB-to-USB adapter, and reference material. The smartphone is available in five colors: dark gray, silver white, green, blue, and orange.

How Cell Phones Work ?

Millions of people in the United States and around the world use cellular phones. They are such great gadgets -- with a cell phone, you can talk to anyone on the planet from just about anywhere!



These days, cell phones provide an incredible array of functions, and new ones are being added at a breakneck pace. Depending on the cell-phone model, you can:
-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 e-mail
-Get information (news, entertainment, stock quotes) from the Internet
-Play games
-Watch TV
-Send text messages
-Integrate other devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and GPS receivers



But have you ever wondered how a cell phone works? What makes it different from a regular phone? What do all those terms like PCS, GSM, CDMA and TDMA mean? In this article, we will discuss the technology behind cell phones so that you can see how amazing they really are. If you are thinking about buying a cell phone, be sure to check out How Buying a Cell Phone Works to learn what you should know before making a purchase.

To start with, one of the most interesting things about a cell phone is that it is actually a radio -- an extremely sophisticated radio, but a radio nonetheless. The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, and wireless communication can trace its roots to the invention of the radio by Nikolai Tesla in the 1880s (formally presented in 1894 by a young Italian named Guglielmo Marconi). It was only natural that these two great technologies would eventually be combined.



Cell-phone Frequencies

In the dark ages before cell phones, people who really needed mobile-communications ability installed radio telephones in their cars. In the radio-telephone system, there was one central antenna tower per city, and perhaps 25 channels available on that tower. This central antenna meant that the phone in your car needed a powerful transmitter -- big enough to transmit 40 or 50 miles (about 70 km). It also meant that not many people could use radio telephones -- there just were not enough channels.


The genius of the cellular system is the division of a city into small cells. This allows extensive frequency reuse across a city, so that millions of people can use cell phones simultaneously.

A good way to understand the sophistication of a cell phone is to compare it to a CB radio or a walkie-talkie.
Full-duplex vs. half-duplex - Both walkie-talkies and CB radios are half-duplex devices. That is, two people communicating on a CB radio use the same frequency, so only one person can talk at a time. A cell phone is a full-duplex device. That means that you use one frequency for talking and a second, separate frequency for listening. Both people on the call can talk at once.

Channels - A walkie-talkie typically has one channel, and a CB radio has 40 channels. A typical cell phone can communicate on 1,664 channels or more!

Range - A walkie-talkie can transmit about 1 mile (1.6 km) using a 0.25-watt transmitter. A CB radio, because it has much higher power, can transmit about 5 miles (8 km) using a 5-watt transmitter. Cell phones operate within cells, and they can switch cells as they move around. Cells give cell phones incredible range. Someone using a cell phone can drive hundreds of miles and maintain a conversation the entire time because of the cellular approach.


In half-duplex radio, both transmitters use the same frequency. Only one party can talk at a time.


In full-duplex radio, the two transmitters use different frequencies, so both parties can talk at the same time.
Cell phones are full-duplex.

In a typical analog cell-phone system in the United States, the cell-phone carrier receives about 800 frequencies to use across the city. The carrier chops up the city into cells. Each cell is typically sized at about 10 square miles (26 square kilometers). Cells are normally thought of as hexagons on a big hexagonal grid, like this:





Because cell phones and base stations use low-power transmitters, the same frequencies can be reused in non-adjacent cells. The two purple cells can reuse the same frequencies.



Cell-phone Channels

A single cell in an analog cell-phone system uses one-seventh of the available duplex voice channels. That is, each cell (of the seven on a hexagonal grid) is using one-seventh of the available channels so it has a unique set of frequencies and there are no collisions:
A cell-phone carrier typically gets 832 radio frequencies to use in a city.
Each cell phone uses two frequencies per call -- a duplex channel -- so there are typically 395 voice channels per carrier. (The other 42 frequencies are used for control channels -- more on this later.)

Therefore, each cell has about 56 voice channels available. In other words, in any cell, 56 people can be talking on their cell phone at one time. Analog cellular systems are considered first-generation mobile technology, or 1G. With digital transmission methods (2G), the number of available channels increases. For example, a TDMA-based digital system (more on TDMA later) can carry three times as many calls as an analog system, so each cell has about 168 channels available.

Cell phones have low-power transmitters in them. Many cell phones have two signal strengths: 0.6 watts and 3 watts (for comparison, most CB radios transmit at 4 watts). The base station is also transmitting at low power. Low-power transmitters have two advantages:
The transmissions of a base station and the phones within its cell do not make it very far outside that cell. Therefore, in the figure above, both of the purple cells can reuse the same 56 frequencies. The same frequencies can be reused extensively across the city.

The power consumption of the cell phone, which is normally battery-operated, is relatively low. Low power means small batteries, and this is what has made handheld cellular phones possible.


The cellular approach requires a large number of base stations in a city of any size. A typical large city can have hundreds of towers. But because so many people are using cell phones, costs remain low per user. Each carrier in each city also runs one central office called the Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO). This office handles all of the phone connections to the normal land-based phone system, and controls all of the base stations in the region.

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World First Fiber Bluetooth Headset (New !!!!)

Believe it or not, there is a Bluetooth Headset made of carbon fiber, and this brand new product today got FCC approval. This special Bluetooth Headset is made by Bluetrek, and it will be priced for $70.





The thing weighs in at a mere .25 ounces, touts Bluetooth v3.0 support, and allows for four and a half hours of talk time or five days on standby. It also comes with a set of four earbuds in different sizes, so anyone can rock the lightweight headset no matter how big, or small, the ear hole.