By MALUM NALU
Ho, ho, ho!
A Merry Christmas to the many thousands of Papua New Guinea who will be better able to enjoy the season through their mobile phones.
Truly, the year 2007 will be remembered as the year of the mobile phone, as competition came in through Digicel and made it possible for thousands of people to buy mobile phones and be able to talk to their loved ones.
Thousands of people in Papua New Guinea, and millions more around the world, now use mobile (cellular) phones.
They are such great gadgets - with a mobile phone, you can talk to anyone on the planet from just about anywhere!
These days, mobile phones provide an incredible array of functions, and new ones are being added at a breakneck pace.
Depending on the mobile 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
Have you ever wondered how a mobile phone works?
What makes it different from a regular phone?
If you are thinking about buying a mobile phone, be sure to check out all the details to learn what you should know before making a purchase.
To start with, one of the most interesting things about a mobile 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.
Digital mobile phones are the second generation (2G) of cellular technology.
They use the same radio technology as analog phones, but they use it in a different way.
Analog systems do not fully utilise the signal between the phone and the cellular network - analog signals cannot be compressed and manipulated as easily as a true digital signal.
This is the reason why many cable companies are switching to digital - so they can fit more channels within a given bandwidth.
It is amazing how much more efficient digital systems can be.
A digital phone converts your voice into binary information (1s and 0s) and then compresses it.
This compression allows between three and 10 digital mobile phone calls to occupy the space of a single analog call.
Many digital cellular systems rely on frequency-shift keying (FSK) to send data back and forth over AMPS.
FSK uses two frequencies, one for 1s and the other for 0s, alternating rapidly between the two to send digital information between the cell tower and the phone.
Clever modulation and encoding schemes are required to convert the analog information to digital, compress it and convert it back again while maintaining an acceptable level of voice quality.
All of this means that digital mobile phones have to contain a lot of processing power.
On a “complexity per cubic inch” scale, mobile phones are some of the most intricate devices people use on a daily basis.
Modern digital cell phones can process millions of calculations per second in order to compress and decompress the voice stream.
If you take a basic digital cell phone apart, you find that it contains just a few individual parts:
* An amazing circuit board containing the brains of the phone
* An antenna
* A liquid crystal display (LCD)
* A keyboard (not unlike the one you find in a TV remote control)
* A microphone
* A speaker
* A battery
The circuit board is the heart of the system.
There are several computer chips in a circuit board.
The analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion chips translate the outgoing audio signal from analog to digital and the incoming signal from digital back to analog.
The digital signal processor (DSP) is a highly-customised processor designed to perform signal-manipulation calculations at high speed.
The microprocessor handles all of the housekeeping chores for the keyboard and display, deals with command and control signaling with the base station and also coordinates the rest of the functions on the board.
The ROM and Flash memory chips provide storage for the phone’s operating system and customisable features, such as the phone directory.
The radio frequency (RF) and power section handles power management and recharging, and also deals with the hundreds of FM channels.
Finally, the RF amplifiers handle signals traveling to and from the antenna.
The display has grown considerably in size as the number of features in mobile phones has increased.
Most current phones offer built-in phone directories, calculators and games.
And many of the phones incorporate some type of PDA or Web browser.
Some phones store certain information, such as the SID and MIN codes, in internal Flash memory, while others use external cards that are similar to SmartMedia cards.
Cell phones have such tiny speakers and microphones that it is incredible how well most of them reproduce sound.
The speaker is about the size of a dime and the microphone is no larger than the watch battery beside it.
Speaking of the watch battery, this is used by the cell phone’s internal clock chip.
What is amazing is that all of that functionality - which only 30 years ago would have filled an entire floor of an office building - now fits into a package that sits comfortably in the palm of your hand!

May the true spirit of Christmas be with you all and you can SMS me on mobile 6849763 or email mnalu@thenational.com.pg .

 

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