Cell phone

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A cell phone (also known as cell-phone, cellphone, cellular phone, mobile phone) seems to be an indispensable item for many people today. Since they always have it along many folks would like to be able to use one as an eBook reader. In fact many units can be used in this way. There are articles in this wiki on smartphones, and PDA's that cover the use of intelligent phones for this purpose. However, what about the dumb phones? It turns out that some of them are not as dumb as you might have thought. Many, so called, dumb phones have a form of Java support called MIDP which will permit them to be used to read eBooks. Nokia makes several of these phones.

[edit] The basics

A cell phone differs from earlier Radiophones in that the cell phone actually talks to a cell tower which can communicate with a network of cell towers while the earlier radiophones went to a wireless access point and then tied to the telephone wired network. The cell tower network is what provides the great versatility and portability to the phone service. The network map looks a little like a honeycomb with all its cells hooked together, hence the name.

The cell technology means the phone doesn't need to have a very powerful transmitter or receiver so it can be small. But these days smaller doesn't mean that it can't have a lot of features. Computer technology, even in a cheap phone, permits the phone itself to have some limited capabilities which can be augmented with capabilities contained at the tower. This permits access to the Internet for example and a phone can just be a display device for programs running at the tower.

EBooks read on this kind of device can be local but are more likely to be read online over the Internet using a data access plan.