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| How Mobile Phones Changed Our Lives Amazingly |
The first mobile phone call was made 50 years ago between two companies that developed mobile phone technology. Since then, this tool is now being used in ways that no one ever expected.
The year was 1973. Joel Engel, an American engineer who worked on NASA's Apollo program, was leading the team trying to build the world's first mobile phone.
Bell Labs, the company where Angell worked, had been instrumental decades earlier in the research and development of phones that could be used to talk on the move.
His team was now trying to take the technology a step further – a device that you could carry around in your hand (the current form of mobile).
On April 3, the landline phone in Angel's laboratory rang. When he picked up the phone, a voice came from the other side, 'Hello, Joel'.
The voice belonged to Martin Cooper. who was the leader of a rival research group working on similar phones at radio and electronics company Motorola.
Cooper said on the phone that I am calling you from a mobile phone. A real mobile phone. A mobile phone that can be held anywhere in the hand.
The rival company won the race to be the first to make a mobile phone and that too in a similar fashion.
Standing in front of reporters and photographers, Cooper made the call from the front of the Hilton Midtown Hotel on Sixth Avenue in New York, about 30 miles from his rival company, Bell Labs, in New Jersey.
It was soon going to be possible to have a mobile phone conversation with another person, and even multiple people, from anywhere at any time.
This was followed by the ability to send short text messages, later images, and finally emojis.
50 years after Cooper made that first mobile phone call, mobile phones are now being used in an extraordinarily multi-party way. How much more 'multifunctional' it has become and has changed our lives in the most unexpected ways.
Cooper's prototype phone was brick-shaped and gray in color, with a large antenna but no screen.
It was not a pretty instrument to look at, but it made history.
Although the US government at the time was supportive of the project, the fledgling industry faced many technical and regulatory challenges.
It took another 10 years for this device, the mobile phone, to become available to the general public.
But the mobile phone era had begun, an era during which mobile phones have changed our lives a lot.
Early mobile phones were expensive and difficult to use.
Leslie Hayden, a lecturer in media and technology at the London School of Economics, was one of the early mobile phone buyers.
He paid a whopping £300 for a Motorola mobile phone in the late 1980s.
"I could run my fingers over his goal number markers," Hayden says. At that stage, it was not the size of a full brick, but the size of a half brick.
It was a very heavy device. You couldn't easily put it in your pocket.'
Christopher Windmill, a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Derby, says that the role of mobile phones at the time was to enable us to communicate with each other, just like landline phones.
"We just removed the phone wire," says Windmill. In the 1970s and 80s, we had access to voice communication and there wasn't much that could be done on these devices.
But we soon forgot that primitive design of the phone.
The 'Nokia' N95, released in 2006, also featured an FM radio, a color screen, stereo speakers, and a video camera.
It also had very slow internet access. For a few months, it was the best phone on the market.
Unfortunately, in the following June, Apple launched the iPhone, which became a major challenge for Nokia. Here in the 2020s, iPhones are everywhere around the world, and the Nokia 'N95' is rarely seen.
But like the iPhone, the N95 exemplifies the high standards that distinguish modern mobile devices from their predecessors: they are not just phones, but rather devices that combine a wide range of technology services into a single device.
Windmill says that computer chips and transistors have gotten smaller and faster, expanding the functionality and uses of these devices. "We get more processing power on them, and they have more capacity to put more sensors."
So early smartphones added features like Internet browsers, cameras, location services, flashlights, Bluetooth, and accelerometers (accelerometers). Automatically switches your display from portrait mode to landscape.
These technical capabilities are getting better and better with time. Today's smartphones include banking, your personal assistant, pocket-sized cinema screens, and even music players. They also have gyroscopes, barometers, thermometers, magnetometers, infrared sensors, and fingerprint sensors.
MobaInnovation in the use of iPhone
Internet speeds for mobile phones have improved dramatically, (thanks in part to 5G Internet. And manufacturers are already discussing the possibility of introducing 6G networks in the coming years).
The computational capacity of phones has also increased, and advanced software applications have provided innovative ways to use these devices.
For example, you talk about medicine. In brain surgery, iPhones have already begun to replace expensive devices that display videos taken through endoscopes.
During the coronavirus (CoVID-19) pandemic, Bluetooth enabled software engineers to create contact detection systems that could tell when we were close to infected people, and that's when we found this mobile phone to be a terrifying ' Alert with a 'ping' sound.
Video calling enables doctors to communicate with and diagnose patients in remote areas.
The combination of artificial intelligence with the extraordinary data collection capabilities of smartphones is creating even more opportunities.
A new British company (startup) 'Novoic' (Novoic) uses machine learning to detect the early signs of Alzheimer's disease by analyzing the voice of conversations recorded on mobile phones.
Similarly, GPS devices in phones also enable us to use them as 'sat-navs'.
But bundled technology has also enabled the creation of navigational features that are less well-known than Google Maps, but very important to its users, such as HapticNav for the blind, or 'Touch'. provide a 'based navigation' facility.
Researchers have used the vibration capabilities inside most modern smartphones to create digital maps similar to Google Maps which create textures that visually impaired people can feel with their fingers and navigate according to their surroundings. can understand
By changing the intensity and frequency of the vibrations they can also create a sense of different 'texture' on the screen as the user can feel their way through a journey, indicating features they want to be aware of.
It has been taken a step further by integrating a phone app 'HapticNav' into a wristband that uses vibrations to guide people to their destinations.
However, mobile phones are often poorly received in school classrooms, creating a distraction for students.
"You can see how the muscles of the human body move," says Windmill. You can take bones apart and see what they're actually made of.'
He added that such apps are helping to make higher education accessible to everyone. You don't need an expensive PC. You don't need an expensive headset. You can put augmented reality (augmented reality), or virtual reality (virtual reality) on any device.
Windmill for young children refers to an augmented reality animation app created by Disney Research, which projects drawings of cartoon characters onto the phone screen as they are colored.
Few fields of human endeavor have not yet been touched by the smartphone. Phones also seem to play a mediating role in our engagement with the natural world.
Many of us use apps like 'PictureThis' or 'Google Lens' to identify plants. Farmers can also use phone-based apps to identify weeds, diseases, pests, and stress symptoms in their fields.
By getting data from local weather stations, farmers are also making more use of the tools provided by these phones that help them manage irrigation schedules. And scientists can monitor the carbon freeze and general health of forests with data collected by LiDAR scanners, which are now available in many popular phones, including the latest iPhones.
'LiDAR' stands for 'light detection and ranging' and uses laser technology to measure the distance to quickly create a 3D digital model of an object or room.
This is what the 'IKEA Place app' uses, for example, to show you how a piece of furniture will look in your home, the app will create a 3D model of it.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found a way to use these phone sensors to measure the diameter of trees in a forest, allowing them to assess the health of the forest.
Smartphone Addiction
But along with the benefits, phones also bring problems. The ill effects of smartphone 'addiction' and their ready access to social media such as Instagram and Twitter have also created widespread fear.
For example how mobile phones affect children's mental health, although the evidence is conflicting.
As smartphones continue to evolve, so many new uses are being revealed.
Elizabeth Woik, author of The Smartphone: Anatomy of an Industry, says, "With the new generation of folding phones, even better phones are being made, and they're even bigger screens that fit in our pockets." with a capacity of
Wike thinks the same is true of 'smartglasses', an innovation that aims to be an adaptable device with the capabilities of a smartphone.
Google Glass was a big well-known failure, says Voik, "but smart glasses actually make a lot of sense once they know how to make a good pair."
Why carry a device in your pocket when you can listen to audio directly and images can guide you to a destination or make a purchase and even help you recognize people.
Who would have thought that Angel's beige box would create such a spectacle?