M y Cellphone



It would be useful to give an overview of the cell phone technology here as this is quite inline with our installation. Let's see how a cell phone works? What makes it different from a regular phone? What do all those confusing terms like PCS, GSM, CDMA and TDMA mean? 

Let's start with the basics: In essence, a cell phone is a radio. 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!

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. 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.

In the holidays, I decided to buy a cell phone as my birthday way about to come in the nexgt month. So I picked upon a tried and tested company i.e. Nokia. Probably my phone has all of the features of a phone in todays generation like it has a fairly generous 4-inch, 480 x 800 display and is powered by a 1 GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor and 512MB of RAM.

Also the front of my phone i.e. Nokia Lumia 520 is mostly screen as you'd expect and at 4-inches it's a decent size for a good gaming experience which is personally one of my key requirements. The pixel density of 233 pixels per inch also isn't bad at all for the money you're paying - sure it's dwarfed by the likes of the 469 ppi HTC One, but it's also many times cheaper.
A huge plus is the ability to use gloves with the screen too - being able to type in the cold weather is becoming a really common ability on phones, but I’m impressed Nokia managed it on such a upcoming and new to the market handset.
Unlike some handsets, the screen here isn't edge-to-edge: there's a black border running the entire way around it. At the sides this border is fairly narrow, but it becomes quite wide at the top to make room for the earpiece and a Nokia logo. It's even wider at the bottom, because that's where you'll find the start, back and search softkeys. The back of the handset is almost featureless, with just a small Nokia logo in the centre, the 5-megapixel camera lens near the top and a tiny loudspeaker near the bottom.

Underneath the battery there are two slots - one for a micro SIM card and one for a microSD card. The Nokia Lumia 520 supports up to 64GB cards, which comes in very handy for bulking up the storage from the fairly limiting 8GB of onboard memory.

At first glance it's certainly an impressive handset for the price, easily competing with the similarly priced Huawei Ascend W1 and potentially rendering the Nokia Lumia 620 redundant but honestly speaking my phone has all the ingredients required for a perfect travel companion and I love my phone.

ABHIK GANGULY
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