YOUR BUSINESS IS OUR BUSINESS: Who knew there’d ever be ‘hand-held ’phones?’

Who in tarnation knew mobile telephony would one day become a common-or-garden reality, with people – including primary school pupils and beggar-bowl ‘street workers’ in Tanzania – moving around and about with hand-held ’phone sets ready to use anytime, anywhere, anyhow?

Honestly, I didn’t! Did you…?

They call them ‘cell,’ ‘cellular’ or ‘mobile’ ’phones. That’s because they don’t need wires to connect them to telephone systems the way we’ve known standard wired telephones down generations!

Indeed, a ‘cellular handset’ is a ‘portable/mobile’ telephone that sends and receives radio signals through a network of short-range transmitters located in overlapping cells throughout a given region – with a central station making connections to regular telephone lines. In addition to telephony, modern-day ‘feature cellphones’ support a myriad other services, including text messaging (multimedia messaging service/short message service), electronic mail (email), Internet access, short-range wireless communications (infrared, ‘Bluetooth’), business applications, video games, digital photography – and, no-doubt, more ‘phenomenals’ soon enough!

That’s to say nothing of ‘smartphones.’ These are mobile ’phones which offer greatly-advanced computing capabilities to users.

Rapidly becoming popular in Tanzania as ‘Simu-Janja’ in ki-Swahili – and typically having a touchscreen/swipe interface, Internet access, and an operating system capable of running downloaded apps – smartphones can perform many of the functions that are routinely performed by computers!

The term ‘smartphone’ was first used in the 1980s to describe a telephone enhanced with computer technology.

Indeed, for all practical purposes, a ‘smartphone’ is virtually a handheld, pocket-size personal computer (PC) with a mobile operating system and an integrated mobile broadband cellular network connection for voice, MMS/SMS, and Internet data communication.

Most smartphones also support ‘Wi-Fi/WiFi,’ the trademark for a facility that ‘allows’ computers, smartphones and other specialized devices to connect to the Internet, or communicate with one another wirelessly within a given area. For nitty-gritty lovers, the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing about 2kilograms (4.4lbs)! Sheesh…

In 1983, the ‘Motorola DynaTAC 8000x’ became the first commercially-available handheld mobile ’phone, weighing 1.75lb and costing $3,995 apiece; roughly Tsh8.97 million today. From 1983 to 2014, “worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion” in an estimated 7.2 billion global population (2014), “reaching the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

Looking back: the US-based Bell Telephone Company had only 10,000 ’phones in service by the middle of 1878…

There were 972 million fixed line ’phones around the world in 2017 – and about five billion individual mobile phone users. All in all, however, there were some 8.124 billion mobile connections, including ‘machine-to-machine’ (M2M) wireless data communication between ‘non-humans.’

When mobile telephony ‘came’ to Tanzania in earnest in the 1990s, handsets cost an arm and a leg – and were a prime target for theft, highway robbert/snatching. That’s changed drastically. Today, handsets are a dime a dozen – and, with some 40.17 million mobile phone subscribers in 2016, Tanzanians (we’re told) have more mobile ’phones than they have toothbrushes, toilets, electricity, clean water or three nutritious meals daily! But that’s another story…

Who knew there’d ever be a surfeit of ‘hand-held phones’ even in beggar-bowl, basket-case nations? Cheers!