Have you ever wondered what’s the difference between a cell phone and a mobile?
The first difference, of course, is that the term "mobile" is mostly used in the United Kingdom, and the term "cell phone" in the United States. On the other hand, many Americans also say "mobile phones", as they don’t really see the difference.
What is a Mobile Phone? /ˈməʊbaɪl fəʊn/
A mobile phone is a portable telephone to make and receive wireless phone calls. This can be done either by using radio frequency transmitting towers called base stations or cell sites. Phone calls over a mobile phone can also be done using mobile towers or via satellite. They were invented in the early 1940s.
What is a Cell Phone? /sɛl fəʊn/
A cell phone (or a cellular phone) is a mobile phone (not a satellite mobile phone) that works on radio frequency transmitted from one transmitting cell to another and is controlled by antenna systems on cell phone towers or stations, called a cellular network (show picture).
These base stations provide wireless network coverage to the cell. The wireless frequencies can be used for the transmission of voice, data, FM radio content, etc. A different set of frequencies is used by each cell to avoid conflict with the neighbouring cells.
So the second main difference is that in the beginning, mobile phones were a lot more limited. There weren’t enough channels or frequencies to operate on, so very few people could use it at one time. The cellular network became the complete opposite. It allowed the same frequency to be reused so that more people could use their mobile phones simultaneously, and it required only low-power transmission.
At some point, the convergence of the term cellular phone and the mobile phone came to mean essentially the same thing without any difference between the two. But calling a phone "cellular" might not be that accurate. It may be more proper to say that a mobile phone is used on a cellular network or a network composed of cells. However, in the end, it doesn’t really matter that much, because now we call all of them smartphones!
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