Mobile phone, Conflict minerals

                                     

Conflict minerals: Conflict minerals
Demand for metals found in mobile phones is fuelling the Congo Civil War. The war claimed almost 5.5 million lives.[62] In a 2012 news story, The Guardian reported, "In unsafe mines deep underground in eastern Congo, children are working to extract minerals essential for the electronics industry. The profits from the minerals finance the bloodiest conflict since the second world war; the war has lasted nearly 20 years and has recently flared up again. ... For the last 15 years, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been a major source of natural resources for the mobile phone industry."[63]

FairPhone is an attempt to develop a mobile phone which does not contain conflict minerals.

Use of mobile phones

In general


Mobile phones are used for a variety of purposes, including keeping in touch with family

 members, conducting business, and having access to a telephone in the event of an emergency. Some people carry more than one cell phone for different purposes, such as for business and personal use. Multiple SIM cards may also be used to take advantage of the benefits of different calling plans—a particular plan might provide cheaper local calls, long-distance calls, international calls, or roaming. The mobile phone has also been used in a variety of diverse contexts in society, for example:

A study by Motorola found that one in ten cell phone subscribers have a second phone that often is kept secret from other family members. These phones may be used to engage in activities including extramarital affairs or clandestine business dealings.[24]
Some organizations assist victims of domestic violence by providing mobile phones for use in emergencies. They are often refurbished phones.[25]
The advent of widespread text messaging has resulted in the cell phone novel; the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age via text messaging to a website that collects the novels as a whole.[26]
Mobile telephony also facilitates activism and public journalism being explored by Reuters and Yahoo![27] and small independent news companies such as Jasmine News in Sri Lanka.
The United Nations reported that mobile phones have spread faster than any other technology and can improve the livelihood of the poorest people in developing countries by providing access to information in places where landlines or the Internet are not available, especially in the least developed countries. Use of mobile phones also spawns a wealth of micro-enterprises, by providing work, such as selling airtime on the streets and repairing or refurbishing handsets.[28]
In Mali and other African countries, people used to travel from village to village to let friends and relatives know about weddings, births and other events, which are now avoided within mobile phone coverage areas, which is usually greater than land line penetration.
The TV industry has recently started using mobile phones to drive live TV viewing through mobile apps, advertising, social tv, and mobile TV.[29] 86% of Americans use their mobile phone while watching TV.
In parts of the world, mobile phone sharing is common. It is prevalent in urban India, as families and groups of friends often share one or more mobiles among their members. There are obvious economic benefits, but often familial customs and traditional gender roles play a part.[30] It is common for a village to have access to only one mobile phone, perhaps owned by a teacher or missionary, but available to all members of the village for necessary calls.[31]
For distributing content

Mobile phone operators

Mobile phone operators

Main article: Mobile phone operator

The world's largest individual mobile operator by subscribers is China Mobile with over 500 million mobile phone subscribers.^[18] Over 50 mobile operators have over 10 million subscribers each, and over 150 mobile operators had at least one million subscribers by the end of 2009.^[19] In February 2010, there were 6 billion mobile phone subscribers, a number that is expected to grow.^[4]

Manufacturers

See also: List of best-selling mobile phones and List of mobile phone makers by country

Prior to 2010, Nokia was the market leader. However, since then competition emerged in the Asia Pacific region with brands such as Micromax, Nexian, and i-Mobile and chipped away at Nokia's market share. Android powered smartphones also gained momentum across the region at the expense of Nokia. In India, their market share also dropped significantly to around 31 percent from 56 percent in the same period. Their share was displaced by Chinese and Indian vendors of low-end mobile phones.^[20]

In Q1 2012, based on Strategy Analytics, Samsung surpassed Nokia, selling 93.5 million units and 82.7 million units, respectively. Standard & Poor's has also downgraded Nokia to 'junk' status at BB+/B with negative outlook due to high loss and still declined with growth of Lumia smartphones was not sufficient to offset a rapid decline in revenue from Symbian-based smartphones over the next few quarters.^[21]

Main article: History of mobile phones

History
Main article: History of mobile phones

An evolution of mobile phones
A hand-held mobile radiotelephone is an old dream of radio engineering. A particularly vivid and in many ways accurate prediction was presented by Arthur C. Clarke in a 1959 essay, where he envisioned a "personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one." He wrote: "the time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth merely by dialing a number." Such a device would also, in Clarke's vision, include means for global positioning so that "no one need ever again be lost." Later, in Profiles of the Future, he predicted the advent of such a device taking place in the mid-1980s.[8]

Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from ships and trains. The race to create truly portable telephone devices began after World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. The advances in mobile telephony have been traced in successive generations from the early "0G" (zeroth generation) services like the Bell System's Mobile Telephone Service and its successor, Improved Mobile Telephone Service. These "0G" systems were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, and were very expensive.

The first handheld mobile cell phone was demonstrated by Motorola in 1973. The first commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. In 1981, this was followed by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.[9] Several other countries then followed in the early to mid-1980s. These first generatiion ("1G") systems could support far more simultaneous calls, but still used analog technology.

In 1991, the second generation (2G) digital cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard, which sparked competition in the sector, as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators.

Ten years later, in 2001, the third generation (3G) was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard.[10] This was followed by 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancements based on the high-speed packet access (HSPA) family, allowing UMTS networks to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

By 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media.[11] Consequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized 4th-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to 10-fold over existing 3G technologies. The first two commercially available technologies billed as 4G were the WiMAX standard (offered in the U.S. by Sprint) and the LTE standard, first offered in Scandinavia by TeliaSonera.