Cell, or mobile, phones have dramatically increased the world's interconnectivity over the past few decades. They are portable, relatively reliable, and now include many functions that have nothing to do with communication. Cell phones are usually easy to learn and understand but some users, especially the elderly, may have trouble understanding all of the things that cell phones are now capable of. To make this easier, the basic functions of modern cell phones are listed below with short descriptions for each. Calling Calling is rather straightforward on any phone whether Read More

Many cell phone users remain confused on what it means to unlock a phone. Most commonly, this term is used to describe the process of removing restrictions placed on using a GSM cell phone by the manufacturer. These restrictions are intended to prevent the mobile phone from being used on competing cell phone carriers or to limit what applications can be installed on the phone. As a result, if the consumer desires to use their phone outside of the local coverage area, high roaming charges can result. These charges only Read More

Cell phone frequencies are the frequency ranges within the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band that are designated for cell phone use. Bluetooth devices, wireless networks, and television signals also use this frequency band. Although cellular phone systems divide cities and geographic areas into smaller cells of coverage, it allows for a fair amount of frequency reuse across the network. This ultimlately permits significantly more cell phone users to talk simultaneously on a network. How Are Cell Phone Networks Designed? Typically, a cell phone service provider is assigned up to 832 Read More

When dealing with a wet phone, it is important to act quickly. Few phone companies offer a warranty on wet phones and have gone as far as to place a "wet strip" on the phone that changes colors when it has gotten wet. What this means is that the wet strip will allow the company to know that the phone was damaged by water and therefore, they don't have to give you a new phone. Fortunately, if you act quick — which happens to be the first and most important Read More

Palm Treo cell phones which run on GSM networks are often “locked” by the GSM carriers so that they cannot be used on another GSM carriers network. Unlocking can be done on GSM-based Treo phones such as the 650, 680, and 750. Unlocking does not apply to CDMA-based Treo phones such as the 700w. The Treo Unlocking Urban Legend There is a persistent, but incorrect, rumor on the Internet that you can unlock your Treo by pressing the key sequence *#*#1234# and then pressing the center D-pad button. The Treo Read More

Cell phone cloning refers to the act of copying the identity of one mobile telephone to another. This is usually done to make fraudulent telephone calls. The bill for the calls go to the legitimate subscriber. This made cloning very popular in areas with large immigrant populations, where the cost to “call home” was very steep. The cloner is also able to make effectively anonymous calls, which attracts another group of interested law breakers. Cell phone cloning started with Motorola “bag” phones and reached its peak in the mid 90’s Read More

BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) is an application development platform for wireless phones. Qualcomm was the company to set up this standard and it should be noted that although it was used for CDMA cellular phones, today it can be used for GSM, GPRS and UMTS. Essentially BREW allows consumers to download and use applications on their mobile phones. These applications can include chat programs, email, location positioning, games, etc… Developing Applications with BREW Many developers like to create applications using BREW. BREW makes it much simpler to create Read More

Many mobile phone users quickly find that the cost to purchase new ringtones can quickly become prohibitive. These same people will many times have music libraries that have songs suitable to convert to ringtones. As a result, finding a convenient method to convert songs to ringtones can save consumers money and help them enjoy their favorite artists without paying additional money to iTunes or other music brokers for a processed ringtone created from the same music. The iTunes multi-media player can be used to create ringtones for use on iDevices Read More

Owning a Blackberry enables its owners to do much more than they could ever accomplish with a basic cell phone. However, one of the most popular features that have carried over from basic cell phone to the BlackBerry is the ability to add ring tones. In earlier models adding ring tones to your Blackberry was quite difficult or not available, however today, if you operate a BlackBerry or later model that uses 4.1 operating system, adding MP3 ring tones is quite simple, here are some tips. 1. Start Up Your Read More

UMTS is an abbreviation for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System. It is one of the third-generation (3g) cell phone technologies quickly developing today. UTMS is also referred to as the 3GSM so as to emphasize the coalition between 3G technology and GSM standard. In theory, the UTMS, using W-CDMA, is supposed to be able to transfer up to 14.0 Mbit/s data transfer rates although real uses have shown a transfer rate of 384 Kbit/s to 3.6 Mbit/s with various handsets. However, this speed is still a lot greater than other competing Read More