Cell Phone: Difference between revisions

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== Real Life ==

* Mobile phones and the cell system did exist as [[Older Than They Think|early as the 1940s]], they were just prohibitively expensive. The cell system was essentially invented by Motorola as a way of managing the large number of police car radios that had to be coordinated when tackling organized crime in American cities.

** These "manual mobile" telephones technically are not "cell phones" as they had a limited number of frequency channels and any phone talking on one channel monopolised the channel city-wide. This led to wait times of up to half an hour to even get an available frequency in congested areas, which led to telephone companies imposing years-long waiting lists for mobile service. The innovation which made mobile telephones "cell phones" in [[The Eighties]] was the use of multiple, small base station transmitters which each covered a tiny area (a "cell") instead of the whole city; this allowed the same frequencies to be re-used aggressively by multiple users across a large metropolitan area. That meant needing the network to be able to automatically "hand off" mobile calls from one base to the next as users moved from one cell to another, and that logic required a bit of actual computing power behind the network.

* The flip phone's design was inspired by ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]'''s communicators. The first clamshell phone was called the StarTAC; wonder why?

* Toy companies have made special cellphones so parents can keep track of their children but the children can't run up huge bills.

** Using discarded cell phones as toys for small children, even if they're not subscribed anywhere, may still lead to misdial calls – as even an unsubscribed handset can call 112, 9-1-1, 999 or similar local emergency numbers.

* A man arrested in Egypt was able to contact his bosses for help by using his cell phone and Twitter to announce what had happened. The people on his Twitter follow list contacted people in the US and got him released.

* Cell phones with cameras are banned from gyms so that people can't take pictures of other gym goers in the shower and post them to the internet, cell phone cameras generally now all play an audible sound when taking photos due to concerns about peeping toms and [[The Chikan|subway perverts]].