You most likely own a cell phone or a mobile phone, as some people call it. Even if you don’t, you’re probably familiar with them.
A cell phone is a wireless phone that uses radio technology to communicate with a network of radio towers called cell towers. Each tower provides an area of radio reception referred to as a cell. A cell network is a collection of networked cell towers with overlapping radio coverage.
Typically, cell tower networks are owned by a cellular service provider and define the service area of that particular provider.
What makes your phone a cell phone?
A cell phone is a wireless mobile phone that works anywhere you have coverage from a cell tower network. Today, this means almost anywhere. Tower coverage is nearly universal wherever people live. So unless you’re in a sparsely populated area, you should have good access to cell signals.
Even those areas see some coverage since service providers try to ensure the major roads have service and the towers cover a large portion of the surrounding area.
Your cell phone has an onboard rechargeable battery that never lasts as long as you would like it to but should last for a few days when it’s new. Lithium-ion batteries have been a big part of what makes the small cell phones we use today possible.
And of course, it uses radio signals to communicate with nearby towers providing you with voice and short message service (SMS or text message) functionality. From the beginning, text messages and voice service were a part of the package. Once cell phones included cameras, service providers added media messaging to send photos over the cell network.
The original way to text someone was to use the number pad on your phone. This made texting clumsy and time-consuming. Over time, predictive technology was introduced that helped speed things up by reducing the number of keys you needed to press. A popular predictive technology was called T9.
Cell phones were developed before data was available over the cell network. As a consequence, original cell phones didn’t have apps or data-enabled features. Devices that hold to this, primarily the absence of data-enabled functionality, are squarely in the cell phone category.
How does a cell phone work in a cell network?
A cell in a cell phone network is the area where your cell phone can communicate with a cell phone tower. You can think of it as a sphere with its center positioned where the antennae on the tower are located.
The sphere’s radius can vary from 10 kilometers or 16 miles to as far as 40km or 25 miles. It depends on how much output power is designed into the tower. As you move further away from the tower, the signal gets weaker. The signal can also get weaker if there are obstructions between your phone and the tower.
Cell phone radio signals work similarly to light waves with the added ability to pass through certain materials. For example, radio signals can pass through most building materials, but they can’t pass through the dirt.
So you can usually get a good signal in your house, but the earth around you may degrade the signal in your basement. So it depends on how much of the signal can reflect down where you are.
Cell phone service providers typically design their cell phone tower networks such that the cells overlap a bit to allow your phone to jump between towers seamlessly. Depending on budgets and the surrounding environment, that can sometimes be challenging. But, it’s still the desired outcome.
The network of towers is tied together, typically using fiber optic networking so that each tower has a high bandwidth connection back to the service provider’s main communications trunk.
As you move from one cell to an adjacent cell, your phone automatically jumps to the higher quality signal giving the user a seamless experience. Sometimes, depending on how the towers are arranged, the jump can be a bit rough.
You may have experienced this if you are using your phone for a voice call or streaming while you’re traveling in a car. Usually, you experience it as a brief interruption in the service. Maybe some static on your call or some stuttering in your streaming.
What makes your cell phone a smartphone?
A smartphone has the same functionality as a cell phone with the added power of a data connection. Coupled with onboard computing power that rivals a desktop computer, the modern smartphone is a powerful tool.
A smartphone has a full-touch keyboard which put an end to clumsy T9 texting on a number pad when the iPhone 1 was released. You may or may not recall that Blackberry was already in the game at the time with a full-button keyboard. Still, the touch keyboard was a superior innovation, and Apple quickly overtook Blackberry with the full-keyboard-loving crowd.
Smartphones have the power to be functionally extensible through apps. Downloading and utilizing apps on your phone puts the power of software in your pocket. Surprisingly, smartphone apps are every bit as powerful as desktop software. In cases where the unique sensors of your phone can be used, there can be even more powerful functions.
The sensors included on a smartphone can be as follows:
- High resolution camera/video sensor
- GPS
- Motion
- Touchscreen
- Light sensor
- And more
Overall, the ability to use data services, use and install apps, and store files or data is what makes your phone a smartphone. In addition, because your phone has the advanced sensors that it does, it can recognize and react to the environment more than a device without all those sensors would be able to.
As smartphones continue to advance, they can sense the environment and do more automatically for us. Things like facial recognition, changing screen orientation based on-screen position or automatically connecting to data sources or devices when within range.