Cell Phone Facts for Kids

A Picture of a few Cell Phones

This web page contains cell phone facts for kids and is an excellent resource for anyone of any age looking to learn about cell phones and smartphones. Our goal is to provide you with accurate, up to date facts about mobile devices. In addition to facts about cell phones, we provide additional resources to help you with your research on the cell phones, smartphones and cellular networks.

The cell phone facts below will help you learn about who invented the first cell phone, who invented the first smartphone, how cell phones work, what are smartphone mobile applications and other mobile device related facts. We hope these cell phone facts are interesting and help you learn more about this revolutionary communications device.

If any of the below cell phone facts are inaccurate, please contact us and let us know.

22 Cell Phone Facts for Kids

  1. A cell phone is a portable telephone that is able to make and receive phone calls, and send and recieve text messages via a radio frequency.
  2. A cell phone is also known as a mobile phone, hand phone, or simply a cell.
  3. The phrase cell phone was coined based on how areas received cellular service, they were broken up into cells.
  4. A smartphone has the same features as a cell phone, but it also has multi-purpose computing abilities.
  5. The first handheld portable cell phone call was made on April 3rd, 1973, by Martin Cooper. He called his rival at Bell Labs, Joel S. Engel on it to brag about his invention.
  6. The first cell phone available to consumers was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x in 1983.
  7. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000x cost almost $4,000 and weighed 2.4 pounds.
  8. The first smartphone was the Apple iPhone in 2007.
  9. The original Apple iPhone cost $499 for 4GB and $599 for 8GB.
  10. The most common smartphone mobile operating systems is Android and iOS. In 2019, they both collectively held over 98% of the market share.
  11. Mobile applications, also known as mobile apps, or simply apps, are a piece of software that is developed to run on a mobile device.
  12. The three most popular mobile app sources are the Apple App Store, Google Play Store and the Microsoft Store.
  13. There have been several generations of mobile-phone networks since the inception of the cell phone. This includes 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G.
  14. Modern day cell phones use a technology called Bluetooth to connect wirelessly to other devices, like headphones, smart locks, smartwatches and speakers.
  15. Bluetooth technology is named after Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsso, the king of Denmark and Norway during the 10th century. Bluetooth technology used Gormsso’s name because it unites devices just how he united the tribes of Denmark.
  16. The best-selling cell phone of all time is the Nokia 1100 and the Nokia 1110. It was introduced in 2003 and 2005 respectively and both had combined sales of 250 million devices.
  17. Nomophobia is the proposed name for someone who has a fear of being without their phone.
  18. In 2012, Apple reported it sold 340,000 iPhones per day. That’s over 14,000 per hour.
  19. The first person to unlock (jailbreak) an iPhone was George Hotz.
  20. People send a lot of text messages. In 2013 it’s estimated that 9 trillion text messages were sent.
  21. Modern-day smartphones have more computing power than the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle, which was used to land on the Moon in 1969.
  22. Cell phones are estimated to have 18 times more bacteria than a toilet handle.

Additional Resources About Cell Phones

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