Remote-Control Your Car with Your Mobile Phone

I have to admit, those dramatic commercials about people in distress being remotely helped by OnStar Advisors sometimes make me wish I bought a GM car. I mean, shouldn't all cars come with emergency assistance, hands-free calling, and services to locate my stolen vehicle? And now, GM is upping the ante for mobile (in both senses of the word) enthusiasts with OnStar smartphone apps, starting with the Chevrolet Volt. The Google-enhanced app can start your car, turn on the lights or activate the horn (in case you can't remember where you parked), and also check auto maintenance needs like fuel level and remaining oil life -- from your iPhone, Droid, or BlackBerry Storm. I'm not a car buff, but the OnStar Mobile App is pretty cool and likely a big help for serious road warriors who are GM customers.
Now that you can use your smartphone as a car starter, to pay for purchases at retail, and as a key for your hotel room, it may be time to wonder, is there anything you can't (or won't soon be able to) do with a smartphone?

Free Mobile Phone Calls - Vonage joins Skype & Fring

Friday August 6, 2010

Vonage recently announced a new mobile application that will allow smartphone users to make free phone calls over Wi-Fi or 3G to their Facebook friends (who also have the app installed). Add the "Vonage Mobile Application for Facebook" to other VoIP mobile apps like Skype Mobile, Google Voice, and Fring, and suddenly it seems silly to pay for mobile calls at all. With everyone (businesses and consumers) looking to cut costs these days, free mobile talk time is definitely advantageous. Here's what you need to know about these mobile VoIP apps:

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Nokia rolls out Dual SIM Mobile Phones: C1-00 C1-01 C1-02 and C2

With the World going Dual SIM, means you can have two connections on same handset, Nokia too introduces a range of Dual SIM Mobile phones in the market. They are all of C series, although C series is not at all new for us because we have already seen Nokia C3 and Nokia C5. All these 4 phones are entry level handsets with satisfying basic need at affordable cost.

So, Nokia understands our needs. I think they may have taken this step to cover up emerging market of Dual SIM Mobiles in country like India. Although, Nokia doesn’t stands anywhere when we talk about smartphones where HTC and Apple are leading this segment. No matter, there is still a potential market to grab up of low-end configuration mobiles.



These new Phones are namely C1-00 (1750 INR) C1-01 (Rs. 2200) C1-02 (Rs 2500) and C2 (Rs. 2850) Don’t expect any lavish features in these mobiles as they are made to offer basic functionality like FM Radio, Color Screen, Flash Light and Send Messages.
Nokia C1-00 overview

A simple phone to make calls and send text messages, flashlight, FM radio and a super battery up to 6 weeks of use. Estimated price of Rs. 1750
Nokia C1-01 and C1-02 overview

The C1-01 C1-02 are very similar phones, the C1-01 includes FM radio, microSD card slot and a VGA resolution camera. C1-02 well, with FM radio, microSD card slot and VGA camera, but also has Bluetooth, Ovi Mail and Chat.
Nokia C2 overview

It’s the most expensive in this range leaving about Rs. 2850, double SIM, with the tools of Life Tools Ovi, Ovi Ovi Mail and Chat, FM radio, microSD card slot, VGA camera, Bluetooth and a battery that Nokia says lasts up to 16.5 days of use.
Nokia Dual SIM Mobiles Availability

They are all scheduled to be launched in the year end of 2010

What do you think? Will these Mobiles prove to be success when other mobile manufacturers are providing low end configuration phones at cheap prices in India already?

Second generation Digital networks

In the 1990s, the 'second generation' (2G) mobile phone systems emerged, primarily using the GSM standard. These 2G phone systems differed from the previous generation in their use of digital transmission instead of analog transmission, and also by the introduction of advanced and fast phone-to-network signaling. The rise in mobile phone usage as a result of 2G was explosive and this era also saw the advent of prepaid mobile phones

In 1991 the first GSM network (Radiolinja) opened in Finland. In general the frequencies used by 2G systems in Europe were higher than those in America, though with some overlap. For example, the 900 MHz frequency range was used for both 1G and 2G systems in Europe, so the 1G systems were rapidly closed down to make space for the 2G systems. In America the IS-54 standard was deployed in the same band as AMPS and displaced some of the existing analog channels.

Coinciding with the introduction of 2G systems was a trend away from the larger "brickle" phones toward tiny 100–200g hand-held devices, which soon became the norm. This change was possible through technological improvements such as more advanced batteries and more energy-efficient electronics, but also was largely related to the higher density of cellular sites caused by increasing usage levels. This decreased the demand for high transmission powers to reach distant towers for customers to be satisfied.

Personal Handy-phone System mobiles and modems used in Japan around 1997–2003

The second generation introduced a new variant to communication, as SMS text messaging became possible, initially on GSM networks and eventually on all digital networks. The first machine-generated SMS message was sent in the UK on 3 December 1992. The first person-to-person SMS text message was sent in Finland in 1993. Soon SMS became the communication method of preference for the youth. Today in many advanced markets the general public prefers sending text messages to placing voice calls.

2G also introduced the ability to access media content on mobile phones, when Radiolinja (now Elisa) in Finland introduced the downloadable ring tone as paid content. Finland was also the first country where advertising appeared on the mobile phone when a free daily news headline service on SMS text messaging was launched in 2000, sponsored by advertising.

The first data services appeared on mobile phones starting with person-to-person SMS text messaging in Finland in 1993. First trial payments using a mobile phone to pay for a Coca Cola vending machine were set in Finland in 1998. The first commercial payments were mobile parking trialled in Sweden but first commercially launched in Norway in 1999. The first commercial payment system to mimic banks and credit cards was launched in the Philippines in 1999 simultaneously by mobile operators Globe and Smart. The first content sold to mobile phones was the ringing tone, first launched in 1998 in Finland. The first full internet service on mobile phones was introduced by NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 1999.

First generation Cellular networks

The main technological development that distinguished the First Generation mobile phones from the previous generation was the use of multiple cell sites, and the ability to transfer calls from one site to the next as the user travelled between cells during a conversation. The first commercially automated cellular network (the 1G generation) was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. The initial launch network covered the full metropolitan area of Tokyo's over 20 million inhabitants with a cellular network of 23 base stations. Within five years, the NTT network had been expanded to cover the whole population of Japan and became the first nation-wide 1G network.

Analog Motorola DynaTAC 8000X Advanced Mobile Phone System mobile phone as of 1983

The second launch of 1G networks was the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in 1981.[18]. NMT was the first mobile phone network featuring international roaming. The Swedish electrical engineer Östen Mäkitalo started to work on this vision in 1966, and is considered as the father of the NMT system and some consider him also the father of the cellular phone.[19][20]

Several countries were among the earliest to launch 1G networks in the early 1980s including the UK, Mexico and Canada. The first 1G network launched in the USA was Chicago based Ameritech in 1983 using the famous first hand-held mobile phone Motorola DynaTAC. In 1984, Bell Labs developed modern commercial cellular technology (based, to a large extent, on the Gladden, Parelman Patent), which employed multiple, centrally controlled base stations (cell sites), each providing service to a small area (a cell). The cell sites would be set up such that cells partially overlapped. In a cellular system, a signal between a base station (cell site) and a terminal (phone) only need be strong enough to reach between the two, so the same channel can be used simultaneously for separate conversations in different cells.

The first NMT installations as well as the First AMPS installations were based on the Ericsson AXE digital exchange nodes.

Cellular systems required several leaps of technology, including handover, which allowed a conversation to continue as a mobile phone traveled from cell to cell. This system included variable transmission power in both the base stations and the telephones (controlled by the base stations), which allowed range and cell size to vary. As the system expanded and neared capacity, the ability to reduce transmission power allowed new cells to be added, resulting in more, smaller cells and thus more capacity. The evidence of this growth can still be seen in the many older, tall cell site towers with no antennae on the upper parts of their towers. These sites originally created large cells, and so had their antennae mounted atop high towers; the towers were designed so that as the system expanded—and cell sizes shrank—the antennae could be lowered on their original masts to reduce range.

Emergence of commercial mobile phone services

In 1956, the first fully automatic mobile phone system, called MTA (Mobile Telephone system A), was developed by Ericsson and commercially released in Sweden. This was the first system that did not require any kind of manual control in base stations, but had the disadvantage of a phone weight of 40 kg (90 lb). MTB, an upgraded version with transistors, weighing 9 kg (20 lb), was introduced in 1965 and used DTMF signaling. It had 150 customers in the beginning and 600 when it shut down in 1983.

Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola, made the first US analogue mobile phone call on a larger prototype model in 1973. This is a reenactment in 2007

In 1958 the USSR also began to deploy the "Altay" national civil mobile phone service specially for motorists.[9] The newly-developed mobile telephone system was based on Soviet MRT-1327 standard. The main developers of the Altay system were the Voronezh Science Research Institute of Communications (VNIIS) and the State Specialized Project Institute (GSPI). In 1963 this service started in Moscow, and in 1970 the Altay service already was deployed in 30 cities of the USSR. The last upgraded versions of the Altay system are still in use in some places of Russia as a trunking system.

In 1959 a private telephone company located in Brewster, Kansas, USA, the S&T Telephone Company, (still in business today) with the use of Motorola Radio Telephone equipment and a private tower facility, offered to the public mobile telephone services in that local area of NW Kansas. This system was a direct dial up service through their local switchboard, and was installed in many private vehicles including grain combines, trucks, and automobiles. For some as yet unknown reason, the system after being placed online and operated for a very brief time period was shut down. The management of the company was immediately changed, and the fully operable system and related equipment was immediately dismantled in early 1960, not to be seen again.

In 1960, the world’s first partly automatic car phone system Mobile System A (MTA)|MTA was launched in Sweden. With MTA, calls could be made and received in the car to/from the public telephone network, and the car phone could be paged. The phone number was dialed using a rotary dial. Calling from the car was fully automatic, while calling to it required an operator. The person who wanted to call a mobile phone had to know which base station the mobile phone was covered by. The system was developed by Sture Laurén and other engineers at Televerket network operator. Ericsson provided the switchboard while Svenska Radioaktiebolaget (SRA) owned by Ericsson and Marconi provided the telephones and base station equipment. MTA phones were consisted of vacuum tubes and relays, and had a weight of 40 kg. In 1962, a more modern version called Mobile System B (MTB) was launched, which was a push-button telephone, and which used transistors in order to enhance the telephone’s calling capacity and improve its operational reliability. In 1971 the MTD version was launched, opening for several different brands of equipment and gaining commercial success.[10][11]

In 1966, Bulgaria presented the pocket mobile automatic phone RAT-0,5 combined with a base station RATZ-10 (RATC-10) on Interorgtechnika-66 international exhibition. One base station, connected to one telephone wire line, could serve up to six customers.

Portable cellphone, 1970s

In December 1971, AT&T submitted a proposal for cellular service to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After years of hearings, the FCC approved the proposal in 1982 for Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) and allocated frequencies in the 824–894 MHz band.[12] Analog AMPS was superseded by Digital AMPS in 1990.

One of the first successful public commercial mobile phone networks was the ARP network in Finland, launched in 1971. Posthumously, ARP is sometimes viewed as a zero generation (0G) cellular network, being slightly above previous proprietary and limited coverage networks.

The origin of the modern cell phone can be traced back to the year 1973 when Motorola invented the first cellular portable telephone to be commercialised, known as Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive is considered to be the inventor of this mobile phone for use in a non-vehicle setting. There was a long race between Motorola and Bell Labs to produce the first such portable mobile phone. Cooper is the first inventor named on "Radio telephone system" filed on October 17, 1973 with the US Patent Office and later issued as US Patent 3,906,166.[13] Other named contributors on the patent included Cooper's boss, John F. Mitchell, Motorola's chief of portable communication products, who successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use outside the home, office or automobile and participated in the design of the cellular phone.[14][15] Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first cellular phone call on a hand-held mobile phone on April 3, 1973 to his rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.[16].

Vodafone made the UK's first mobile call at a few minutes past midnight on 1 January 1985.[17]

Mobile Information

In 1908, U.S. Patent 887,357 for a wireless telephone was issued to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this patent to "cave radio" telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as the term is currently understood.[1]

In 1910 Lars Magnus Ericsson installed a telephone in his car, although this was not a radio telephone. While travelling across the country, he would stop at a place where telephone lines were accessible and using a pair of long electric wires he could connect to the national telephone network.[2]

In Europe, radio telephony was first used on the first-class passenger trains between Berlin and Hamburg in 1926. At the same time, radio telephony was introduced on passenger airplanes for air traffic security. Later radio telephony was introduced on a large scale in German tanks during the Second World War. After the war German police in the British zone of occupation first used disused tank telephony equipment to run the first radio patrol cars.[citation needed] In all of these cases the service was confined to specialists that were trained to use the equipment. In the early 1950s ships on the Rhine were among the first to use radio telephony with an untrained end customer as a user.

Two-way radios (known as mobile rigs) were used in vehicles such as taxicabs, police cruisers, and ambulances, but were not mobile phones because they were not normally connected to the telephone network. Users could not dial phone numbers from their vehicles. A large community of mobile radio users, known as the mobileers, popularized the technology that would eventually give way to the mobile phone. Originally, mobile two-way radios were permanently installed in vehicles, but later versions such as the so-called transportables or "bag phones" were equipped with a cigarette lighter plug so that they could also be carried, and thus could be used as either mobile or as portable two-way radios. During the early 1940s, Motorola developed a backpacked two-way radio, the Walkie-Talkie and later developed a large hand-held two-way radio for the US military. This battery powered "Handie-Talkie" (HT) was about the size of a man's forearm.

In 1946 soviet engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zaharchenko successfully tested their version of a radio mobile phone mounted inside a car. The device could connect to local telephone network with a range of up to 20 kilometers.[citation needed]

Top of cellular telephone tower

In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles.[3] Philip T. Porter, also of Bell Labs, proposed that the cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas that would transmit/receive in three directions (see picture at right) into three adjacent hexagon cells.[4] The technology did not exist then and the frequencies had not yet been allocated. Cellular technology was undeveloped until the 1960s, when Richard H. Frenkiel and Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs developed the electronics.

During the 1950s the experiments of the pioneers started to appear as usable services across society, both commercially and culturally. In the 1954 movie Sabrina, the businessman Linus Larrabee (played by Humphrey Bogart) makes a call from the phone in the back of his limousine.

In 1957 young Soviet radio engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich from Moscow created the portable mobile phone, named after himself as LK-1 or "radiophone".[5] This true mobile phone consisted of a relatively small-sized handset equipped with an antenna and rotary dial, and communicated with a base station. Kupriyanovich's "radiophone" had 3 kilogram of total weight, could operate up to 20 or 30 kilometers, and had 20 or 30 hours of battery lifespan. LK-1 and its layout was depicted in popular Soviet magazines as Nauka i zhizn, 8, 1957, p. 49, Yuniy technik, 7, 1957, p. 43–44. Engineer Kupriyanovich patented his mobile phone in the same year 1957 (author's certificate (USSR Patent) # 115494, 1.11.1957). The base station of LK-1 (called ATR, or Automated Telephone Radiostation) could connect to local telephone network and serve several customers. During 1958, Kupriyanovich resized his "radiophone" to "pocket" version. The weight of improved "light" handset was about 500 grams.

In 1969, a patent for a wireless phone using an acoustic coupler for incoming calls was issued in US Patent Number 3,449,750 to George Sweigert of Euclid, Ohio on June 10, 1969. Dialing a number for outgoing calls was not provided.

In all these early examples, a mobile phone had to stay within the cell area serviced by one base station throughout the phone call, ie there was no continuity of service as the phones moved through several cell areas. The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff, as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology, were described in the 1970s. In 1970 Amos E. Joel, Jr., another Bell Labs engineer,[6] invented an automatic "call handoff" system to allow mobile phones to move through several cell areas during a single conversation without loss of conversation. Also Fluhr and Nussbaum,[7] Hachenburg et al.[8] , and U.S. Patent 4,152,647, issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and assigned by them to the United States Government.