Mobile Phone

A mobile phone, or cell phone, is a portable wireless telephone that lets a user make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a service area, unlike a fixed location landline phone, with the radio link connecting to a mobile operator's switching systems, which provide access to the public switched telephone network. The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by Martin Cooper of Motorola in New York City on April 3, 1973, using a handset weighing about two kilograms, and in 1979 Nippon Telegraph and Telephone launched the world's first cellular network, in Japan, with the DynaTAC 8000x becoming the first commercially available handheld mobile phone in 1983. Modern mobile telephony relies on a cellular network architecture and, beyond voice calls, digital mobile phones now support text and multimedia messaging, email, internet access, short range wireless links such as Bluetooth, digital photography and video, multimedia streaming and, in the case of smartphones, substantial computing power. Worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew from 1993 to 2024 to more than 9.1 billion, and by the mid 2020s over 90 percent of the population owned at least one mobile phone in almost half of the world's countries.