Portal:Telephones

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A telephone, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that enables two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into electronic signals that are transmitted via cables and other communication channels to another telephone which reproduces the sound to the receiving user. The term is derived from Ancient Greek: τῆλε, romanized: tēle, lit. 'far' and φωνή (phōnē, voice), together meaning distant voice.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be granted a United States patent for a device that produced clearly intelligible replication of the human voice at a second device. This instrument was further developed by many others, and became rapidly indispensable in business, government, and in households. (Full article...)

A mobile phone, or cell phone, is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones (landline phones). This radio frequency link connects to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, providing access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern mobile telephony relies on a cellular network architecture, which is why mobile phones are often referred to as 'cell phones' in North America. (Full article...)

A smartphone, often simply called a phone, is a mobile device that combines the functionality of a traditional mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multimedia playback and streaming. Smartphones have built-in cameras, GPS navigation, and support for various communication methods, including voice calls, text messaging, and internet-based messaging apps. (Full article...)

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Motorola Mobility LLC, marketing as Motorola, is an American consumer electronics manufacturer primarily producing smartphones and other mobile devices running Android. Headquartered at Merchandise Mart in Chicago, Illinois, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese technology company Lenovo.

Motorola Mobility was formed on January 4, 2011, after a split of the original Motorola into two separate companies, with Motorola Mobility assuming the company's consumer-oriented product lines, including its mobile phone business, as well as its cable modems and pay television set-top boxes. In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion; the main intent of the purchase was to gain Motorola Mobility's patent portfolio, in order to protect other Android vendors from litigation. Shortly after the purchase, Google sold Motorola Mobility's cable modem and set-top box business to Arris Group, and products increasingly focused on entry-level smartphones. Under the ATAP division, Google also began development on Project Ara. In October 2014, Google sold Motorola Mobility for $2.91 billion to Lenovo, which excluded ATAP and most of the patents. Lenovo's existing smartphone division was subsumed by Motorola Mobility.

The company currently sell a range of smartphones, mainly consisting of the high-end Edge series, the Razr series of foldables, the Moto G series, and the budget Moto E series, as well as a number of other series and products depending on region. As of 2024, its current flagship device is the Motorola Edge 50. (Full article...)

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*Get Smart* character Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) using his signature shoe phone

A shoe phone is a shoe that has a telephone within it. Though there is no specific evidence that spies or those involved in espionage actually used shoe phones, they were popularised by fictional spies in television shows, most notably the television series Get Smart. Modern mobile phone technology has allowed for the development and production of working shoe phones. (Full article...)

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Reproduction of an IOS phone disconnect tone (not the original audio)

A disconnect tone in telephony is a tone provided to the remaining party to a call after the remote party hangs up. Typically, the disconnect tone is a few cycles of the reorder, busy, or the off-hook tone (e.g. in US), or between five and fifteen seconds of the Number Unobtainable tone (e.g. in UK). (Full article...)

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The following are images from various telephone-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Inserted memory and SIM cards (from Smartphone)
Image 2Cellular networks work by only reusing radio frequencies (in this example frequencies f1–f4) in non adjacent cells to avoid interference (from Mobile phone)
Image 3A smartphone touchscreen (from Smartphone)
Image 4Personal Handy-phone System mobiles and modems, 1997–2003 (from Mobile phone)
Image 5A Moto G7 Power; its display uses a tall aspect ratio and includes a "notch". (from Smartphone)
Image 6Dupuis and Haug during a GSM meeting in Belgium, April 1992 (from Mobile phone)
Image 7IBM Simon and charging base (1994) (from Smartphone)
Image 8The LG Prada with a large capacitive touchscreen introduced in 2006 (from Smartphone)
Image 9A Meizu MX4 with Flyme OS (from Smartphone)
Image 10People using phones while walking (from Mobile phone)
Image 11The master telephone patent granted to Bell, 174465, March 7, 1876 (from History of the telephone)
Image 12The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. In 1983, it became the first commercially available handheld cellular mobile phone. (from Mobile phone)
Image 13Mobile payment system. (from Smartphone)
Image 14Reis's telephone around 1861, first device called telephone (from History of the telephone)
Image 15A French Gower telephone of 1912 at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris (from History of the telephone)
Image 16A German rotary dial telephone, the W48 (from History of the telephone)
Image 17The Nokia 9110 Communicator, opened for access to keyboard (from Smartphone)
Image 18Martin Cooper of Motorola, shown here in a 2007 reenactment, made the first publicized handheld mobile phone call on a prototype DynaTAC model on 3 April 1973. (from Mobile phone)
Image 19Optical track pad sensor of an HTC Legend, 2010. (from Smartphone)
Image 20The HTC Desire, a 2010 smartphone with optical trackpad and search button (from Smartphone)
Image 21Thomas Edison invented the carbon microphone which produced a strong telephone signal. (from History of the telephone)
Image 22Tivadar Puskás proposed the telephone switchboard exchange in 1876. (from History of the telephone)
Image 231896 telephone (Sweden) (from History of the telephone)
Image 24Private conversation, 1910 (from History of the telephone)
Image 25Top of cellular telephone tower (from History of the telephone)
Image 261917 wall telephone, open to show magneto and local battery (from History of the telephone)
Image 27Active mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants (from Mobile phone)
Image 28Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876. (from History of the telephone)
Image 29Mobile payment system (from Mobile phone)
Image 30E-waste in Agbogbloshie (from Smartphone)
Image 31This layout of the camera viewfinder was first introduced by Apple with iOS 7 in 2013. Towards the late 2010s, several other smartphone vendors have ditched their layouts and implemented variations of this layout. (from Smartphone)
Image 32Typical mobile phone mini-SIM card (from Mobile phone)
Image 33Smartphone with infrared transmitter on top for use as remote control (from Smartphone)
Image 34A 19th century acoustic tin can or "lovers' telephone" (from History of the telephone)
Image 35A text message (SMS) (from Mobile phone)
Image 36Two decades of evolution of mobile phones, from a 1992 Motorola DynaTAC 8000X to the 2014 iPhone 6 Plus (from Mobile phone)
Image 37A driver using two handheld mobile phones at once (from Mobile phone)
Image 38Philipp Reis, 1861, constructed the first telephone, today called the Reis telephone. (from History of the telephone)
Image 39Oppo Find X6 features software-based tuning co-developed with Hasselblad (from Smartphone)
Image 40A user consulting a mapping app on a phone (from Smartphone)
Image 41A Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus, featuring a "hole-punch" camera (from Smartphone)
Image 42A sign along Bellaire Boulevard in Southside Place, Texas (Greater Houston) states that using mobile phones while driving is prohibited from 7:30 am to 9:00 am and from 2:00 pm to 4:15 pm. (from Smartphone)
Image 43"Device options" menu of Samsung Mobile's TouchWiz user interface as of 2013, accessed by holding the power button for a second (from Smartphone)
Image 44Antonio Meucci's telephone. (from History of the telephone)
Image 45Android smartphones (from Mobile phone)
Image 46Mobile/desktop convergence: the Librem 5 smartphone can be used as a basic desktop computer (from Smartphone)
Image 47
Bell prototype telephone stamp
Centennial Issue of 1976
(from History of the telephone)
Image 48A sign in the US restricting cell phone use to certain times of day (no cell phone use between 7:30–9:00 am and 2:00–4:15 pm) (from Mobile phone)
Image 49Mobile phone subscribers per 100 inhabitants. 2014 figure is estimated. (from Mobile phone)
Image 50Antonio Meucci, 1854, constructed telephone-like devices. (from History of the telephone)
Image 51The original Apple iPhone; following its introduction in 2007, the common smartphone form factor shifted to large touchscreen software interfaces without physical keypads (from Smartphone)
Image 52A high-capacity portable battery charger (power bank) (from Smartphone)
Image 53A Nexus 6, an Android smartphone, displaying the Main Page of the English Wikipedia (from Smartphone)
Image 54Apple iPhone smartphone (from History of the telephone)
Image 55Tooltip in Kiwi Browser, a Google Chromium derivative, reveals the full URL by hovering over the tab list using the stylus on a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. (from Smartphone)
Image 56The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra has an artificial intelligence-powered feature (from Smartphone)
Image 57Elisha Gray, 1876, designed a telephone using a water microphone in Highland Park, Illinois. (from History of the telephone)
Image 58Several BlackBerry smartphones, which were highly popular in the mid-late 2000s (from Smartphone)
Image 59Receiver schematic, c.1906 (from History of the telephone)
Image 60Actor portraying Alexander Graham Bell in a 1932 silent film. Shows Bell's second telephone transmitter (microphone), invented 1876 and first displayed at the Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia. (from History of the telephone)
Image 61A New York City driver holding two phones (from Smartphone)
Image 62Xiaomi 13 Ultra featured a Leica Summicron camera system (from Smartphone)
Image 63Historical marker commemorating the first telephone central office in New York State (1878) (from History of the telephone)
Image 64Scrapped mobile phones (from Mobile phone)

Selected biography

Anthony Pollok (c. 1829 – July 4, 1898) was an American patent attorney who, with Marcellus Bailey, helped prepare Alexander Graham Bell's patents for the telephone and related inventions. (Full article...)

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Alexander Graham Bell Thomas Edison Innocenzo Manzetti Charles Bourseul Johann Philipp Reis Antonio Meucci Tivadar Puskás Douglas H. Ring W. Rae Young Martin Cooper (inventor) Thomas Cowherd Gardiner Greene Hubbard Thomas A. Watson Elisha Gray George Sweigert Pat Fleet John Draper

Selected images

Image 1Rotary dial telephone, probably from Belgium; the circuit diagram inside is in Dutch and French
Image 2A traditional North American rotary phone dial. The associative lettering was originally used for dialing named exchanges but was kept because it facilitated memorization of telephone numbers.
Image 3Mailbox and public telephone in Haßfurt, Germany
Image 4Landline call blocking in use
Image 5The AUTOVON was a worldwide American military telephone system that was built starting in 1963.
Image 6Automatic electric Rotary dial telephone
Image 7A Bell Canada payphone with digital display
Image 8Acoustic telephone ad, The Consolidated Telephone Co., Jersey City, New Jersey, 1886
Image 9Push-button telephone
Image 10A Funke + Huster telephone inside the Idrija Mine, Slovenia
Image 11A cordless phone
Image 12An Italian gettone telefonico (telephone token) from 1945, which was used in Italian phone booths
Image 13A historic telephone booth in Skansen, Stockholm
Image 14Track-side emergency brake and emergency telephones at the platform of the metro station Aspern Nord, Donaustadt, Vienna, Austria
Image 15Foldable smartphones
Image 16Public telephone, Bucharest, Romania
Image 17Emergency telephones, on the Paris-Bordeaux railway line, Saint-Saviol station, Vienne, France
Image 18Android smartphones
Image 19A Western Electric candlestick phone from the 1920s
Image 20A Northern Electric telephone, model number N415H, circa 1950 (probably)
Image 21Rotary dial telephone, probably from Belgium; the circuit diagram inside is in Dutch and French
Image 22Historical telephone with the German imperial eagle and the heraldic shield of the House of Hohenzollern dynasty; Vollmer's Mill, Seebach, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Image 23A police box outside Earl's Court tube station in London, built in 1996 and based on the 1929 Gilbert Mackenzie Trench design
Image 24Photograph of the interior of the Prairie Grove Airlight Outdoor Telephone Booth in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
Image 25Telephone booth box art outside the Tower of London, 2012
Image 26An example of a K6, the most common red telephone box model, photographed in London in 2012
Image 27Apple iPhones
Image 28Wooden wall telephone with a hand-cranked magneto generator

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v t e Telephony
Types	Landline Cable telephony Mobile phone Satellite phone Photophone
Accessories	Answering machine Caller ID
Connectivity	Cable protection system Communications satellites Fibre-optical Free-space optical ISDN Mobile phone signal POTS PSTN Submarine cables VoIP
Calls	Missed call Misdialed call Nuisance call Phone tag
Applications	Fax transmission Telephone calls Telephone newspapers Théâtrophone Video calls
Telecommunication portal Telephones portal

v t e Emergency telephone numbers
Emergency telephone Harmonised service of social value
000 (Australia) 102 (India) 106 (Australia) 108 (India) 110 (Iran, Japan, China) 111 (New Zealand) 112 (Europe and others, worldwide GSM mobile networks) 119 (parts of Asia and Jamaica) 120 (China) 122 (Austria, Egypt, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) 123 (Colombia, Egypt) 128 (Mercosur member states) 190 (Brazil) 911 (Iraq, North America E-911 system, Philippines) 988 (North America Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) 999 (Bangladesh, UK and others) 1122 (Pakistan)
Telephones portal Telecommunication portal List article Category Wikimedia Commons