ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews an impressive change in the size and capabilities of cellular phones and their individual components. First-generation cellular phones for analog cellular networks were very big and for voice processing only. Cellular phones continue to be different from other multimedia devices, such as laptops or personal computers. Cellular phones continue to be resource constrained in terms of memory, energy, and processing power, which requires extra care and knowledge from the application developer. Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) are included in cellular phones to improve their performance. DSPs are optimized processors to handle computationally intensive and repetitive mathematical operations quickly such as Fast Fourier Transforms, compression, and coding/decoding algorithms. Cellular phones, as any other computer, utilize Read Only Memory and Random Access Memory. Cellular phones are becoming an integrated mobile multimedia device capable of handling voice calls, media streams, and data over multiple types of networking wireless interfaces.
