A PC In Your Pocket or How Many Use The Mobile Int...

It is now possible to work in the street with a mobile phone almost like home or office with a PC. You can use these new mobile phones called smartphones without paying much, without managing duplicated emails, contacts, calendar etc. .. or without synchronizing data with a still camera.

The aim of this paper is to first provide some guiding principles to use and very practical advice to make best use these new phones.

The mobile phone: how does it work?

I started with a mobile phone in 1985 with the analog system Radiocomm 2000. It was a classic radio transceiver. The voice quality was very poor, the time of establishment of a communication very long, expensive pricing. The number of users was limited by a small number of frequencies available.

Digital mobile telephony began in the early 1990s in Europe with the advent of GSM (Global System for Mobile). The system transmits voice and text messages (SMS) to digital. The sound quality has become convenient. The set-up is a few seconds. The problem has been fixed frequency by the juxtaposition of cells of varying sizes that allow hundreds of simultaneous calls per cell. The price of equipment has become very cheap as and when increasing the number of units sold. It remains the cost of communications, still too high in France because of an oligopoly. The arrival in early 2010 for Free in this landscape will perhaps shake the status quo.

The deployment of the Internet has led to a request for access by mobile phones, not just to provide the necessary speed, the voice channel is limited to ten kbps We remember the flop of WAP and dashed hopes to UMTS. Today most “Smartphones” are compatible GSM, GPRS (30-40 kbps), EDGE (80-115 kbps) and HSDPA (7.2 Mbit / s downstream and 128Kbit / s upstream) . The type of active connection (switching is automatic) is usually indicated on your phone (E for EDGE, HSDPA H, etc. ..) and varies depending on where you are. In addition to these mobile networks, your phone can connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi and has a Bluetooth wireless connection to connect to a headset or stationary equipment such as a PC. It is also generally possible to connect via USB to a PC to exchange files or recharge the battery.