Terminology

Related non-mobile-phone systems

Car phone
A type of telephone permanently mounted in a vehicle, these often have more powerful transmitters, an external antenna and loudspeaker for handsfree use. They usually connect to the same networks as regular mobile phones.

Cordless telephone (portable phone)

Cordless phones are telephones which use one or more radio handsets in place of a wired handset. The handsets connect wirelessly to a base station, which in turn connects to a conventional land line for calling. Unlike mobile phones, cordless phones use private base stations (belonging to the land-line subscriber), and which are not shared.

Professional Mobile Radio

Advanced professional mobile radio systems can be very similar to mobile phone systems. Notably, the IDEN standard has been used as both a private trunked radio system as well as the technology for several large public providers. Similar attempts have even been made to use TETRA, the European digital PMR standard, to implement public mobile networks.

Radio phone

This is a term which covers radios which could connect into the telephone network. These phones may not be mobile; for example, they may require a mains power supply, they may require the assistance of a human operator to set up a PSTN phone call.

Satellite phone

This type of phone communicates directly with an artificial satellite, which in turn relays calls to a base station or another satellite phone. A single satellite can provide coverage to a much greater area than terrestrial base stations. Since satellite phones are costly, their use is typically limited to people in remote areas where no mobile phone coverage exists, such as mountain climbers, mariners in the open sea, and news reporters at disaster sites.

Usage

The cell-phone novel is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age via text messaging to a website that collects the novels as a whole.[13] In virtual online computer games, readers can put themselves into first person in the story. Cell phone novels create a personal space for each individual reader. Paul Levinson, in Information on the Move (2004), says "...nowadays, a writer can write just about as easily, anywhere, as a reader can read" and they are "not only personal but portable".