Patent Application
20060058057
The present invention relates to telecommunications systems and particularly to mobile wireless cellular telephone systems.
With the globalization of business, industry and trade wherein transactions and activities within these fields have been changing from localized organizations to diverse transactions over the face of the world, the telecommunication industries have been expanding rapidly. Wireless telephones and, particularly, cellular telephones have become so pervasive that their world wide number is in the order of hundreds of millions.
Because of the widespread use of cellular telephones, particularly in business and trade, the functions demanded of the standard cellular handheld telephones have been rapidly increasing. In this connection, in order to better understand the dynamics of these changes, a review of telecommunication should be helpful. The standard wired telecommunications system, which has been in use world wide for well over 120 years, is the conventional handheld or speaker input wired into a base that in turn is wired into a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) with wired switched channel paths to and from other telephones or like devices through their bases. These telephones are respectively connected to the PSTN via local switching centers or switching nodes in a fully wired telecommunication system. Conventionally, these switching centers have many telephones connected to each. The centers operate to control the channel connections, i.e. switch into and out of the PSTN, those calls originated or terminated at telephone stations.
In addition, there have been developed, over the past 20 years, two major mobile wireless systems: 1) the short range wireless radio frequency (RF) “cordless” telephone system; and 2) the mobile wireless long range RF “wireless” telephone system that has been commercialized primarily as the “cellular” telephone system.
Before the cellular wireless phone system was developed, long range mobile wireless phones were relatively rudimentary; they were usually in automobiles. There was usually one central tower with about 25 channels available on the tower. The mobile wireless telephone needed a large powerful transmitter, usually in the automobile that had to transmit up to 50 miles. This was too cumbersome for any personal or portable phone. In the cellular system for the handheld mobile wireless phone, an area such as a city is broken up into small area cells. Each cell is about 10 square miles in area. Each has its base station that has a tower for receiving/transmitting and a base connected into PSTN. Even though a typical carrier is allotted about 800 frequency channels, the creation of the cells permit extensive frequency reuse so that tens of thousands of people in the city can be using their cell phones simultaneously. Cell phone systems are now preferably digital with each cell having over 160 available channels for assignment to users. In a large city there may be hundreds of cells, each with its tower and base station. Because of the number of towers and users per carrier, each carrier has a Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO) that controls all of the base stations in the city or region and controls all of the connections to the land based PSTN. When a client cell phone gets an incoming call, MTSO tries to locate what cell the client mobile phone is in. The MTSO then assigns a frequency pair for the call to the cell phone. The MTSO then communicates with the client over a control channel to tell the client or user what frequency channels to use. Once the user phone and its respective cell tower are connected, the call is on between the cell phone and tower via two-way long range RF communication. In the United States, cell phones are assigned frequencies in the 824-894 MHz ranges. Since transmissions between the cell telephone and cell tower are digital, but the speaker and microphone in the telephone are analog, the cell telephone has to have a D to A converter from the input to the phone speaker, and an A to D converter from the microphone to the output to the cell tower. Cellular arrays offer a very effective means of wireless communication within their array areas in the order of 10 square miles each. The cellular telephone systems described above are second generation (2G) systems. Over the past two or three years, the industry has been undergoing a transition from these second generation systems to third generation (3G) systems, the standards and protocols of which have been defined by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). One of the ITU's protocols involves Global Roaming, i.e. any 3G cellular telephone should be able to communicate with any other 3G cellular telephone any where in the world. 3G protocols require a minimum transmission rate of 144 Kbits/s from a speeding vehicle, 384 Kbits/s from a walking pedestrian and 2 Mbits/s from a stationary position. With the achievement of such high data transmission rates, many cellular phone functions become possible, such as navigation, geographic tracking, location services and various multimedia functions. The cellular phone systems are required to handle the new MPEG-4 data compression functions. As a result, two-way video conferencing between multiple parties on cellular telephones is now practical with this MPEG-4 function. This has led to increased teleconferencing involving multiple cellular telephones. In addition, with the increased multimedia function becoming available on cellular telephones, the conventional cellular telephone memory of up to 8 megabytes has been insufficient to cover the memory and storage needs of conventional cellular telephone users of systems with this third generation technology (3G).
The present invention provides cellular telephones embodying 3G system protocols with a storage drive that can add upwards of two to four gigabytes of data storage to the mobile wireless cellular telephone member in a portable attachment readily integratable with any standard cellular 3G telephone housing.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a mobile cellular telephone member comprising wireless RF means for communicating with a station in a cell of a cellular telephone system, a display for displaying data received from the cellular system, a data processing unit for controlling the operational functions of the cellular telephone member and the standard limited capacity telephone memory for storing said operational functions, but further including a high capacity ancillary storage unit removably attached to said telephone member. The mobile cellular telephone member preferably includes a housing having means for receiving the ancillary storage unit. This ancillary storage unit is preferably a programmable memory card, such as a flash memory card, e.g. a memory stick. The housing may include a USB I/O slot functioning as the means for receiving a removable memory card inserted into said USB I/O slot. Best results in accordance with the invention are found when the memory card is a USB Key Drive connected into the USB I/O slot.
The present invention will be better understood and its numerous objects and advantages will become more apparent to those skilled in the art by reference to the following drawings, in conjunction with the accompanying specification, in which:
Referring to
Now with respect to
The generalized cell telephone shown in
It should be noted that for purposes of illustrating the present invention, details about the audio and video portions of the 3G cellular telephone have been omitted. These are not specific for the present invention and are well described in the above-referenced literature on cellular telephones and particularly 3G cellular technology.
The USB key drive 62 is connected via a standard system bus under the control of the telephone processor 65 to RAM 66 and ROM 64 in order to conventionally interchange this high capacity storage with system memory. This addition of the key drive will extend the 4 to 8 Megabyte telephone memory with from 1 to 3 Gigabytes of ancillary storage. USB key drives are well documented in the art. For a general description of such structures, reference is made to the on-line Wikipedia Foundation free encyclopedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keydrive.
Although certain preferred embodiments have been shown and described, it will be understood that many changes and modifications may be made therein without departing from the scope and intent of the appended claims.
