In this day and age, hardly anyone can dare say he can let a week pass by without having to use his or her cell phone. And everyone tries to justify that cell phones have become a necessary tool of communication and that he or she needs to use them. Well, let's put it straight. Historically, necessity has always invented solutions and equipments that satisfied them. It never was the other way round. Even the cell phones, in their present or generic forms, when there already existed a huge vacuum for them. So, I will take the position with the famous saying, 'you can't hold an idea whose time has come.'

Cell Phone: How Does It Work and How It Helps You Cell phones work like two way radios which receive and transmit voice which are in the form of radio frequency waves. When you speak into a cell phone, it coverts your voice into these electromagnetic radio waves which can travel in air till they meet their destination. The designated receiver is the called phone, which picks up the RF signals and converts back to understandable human speech. If signals have to travel long distances, like in a long distance call, the signals are picked up by a combination of base stations and satellites which receive and retransmit signals back and forth. For simplicity, you can think of satellites and base stations as a series of mirrors that redirect signals between two ends.

Two Rival Technologies for Cell Phones In this day, there are two types of cell phones which are popular. Although, it won't mean a bit different to you and I, they use two 'rival' technologies. The first and the more popular one is called GSM, an acronym for Global System for Mobile phones. The third generation of this is the reigning technology which moved cell phones from ordinary phones to being a 'what not.' You have video and still cameras, MP3 players, internet browsers, make shift computers, fax machines etc to name a few.

The next, but a recent entrant is CDMA (Code Division Multiplication Access) technology. Although new, this is now way inferior to its competitor GSM. Anyone using CDMA can never tell whether it is CDMA unless he opens it or someone else tells him. Well, why open? GSM cell phones use replaceable electronic chips called SIM cards which contain many data about you and cell phone to locate you and preferences like billing etc. In CDMA technology, these data are encoded into the irreplaceable microchips.

Can you live without cell phones? You will have to live in deep woods to try it out where there is no connectivity at all. But did you know there is just one number that can be dialed without connectivity? Fine, you can't exactly live without this emergency number: 112 (varies).