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96-456: Mobile positioning may be used for location-based services that disclose the actual coordinates of a mobile phone. Telecommunication companies use this to approximate the location of a mobile phone, and thereby also its user. The location of a mobile phone can be determined in a number of ways. The location of a mobile phone can be determined using the service provider's network infrastructure. The advantage of network-based techniques, from

192-411: A gyroscope , an accelerometer , and more ), and support diverse wireless communication protocols (such as LTE , 5G NR , Wi-Fi , Bluetooth , and satellite navigation ). In the mid-2020s, smartphone manufacturers have begun to integrate satellite messaging connectivity and satellite emergency services into devices for use in remote regions where there is no reliable cellular network . Following

288-539: 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. Smartphones are distinguished from older-design feature phones by their more advanced hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems , access to

384-610: A warrant . In November 2017, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government violates the Fourth Amendment by accessing historical records containing the physical locations of cellphones without a search warrant. Mobile positioning data Mobile positioning data (MPD) is a form of big data which results from the high data volumes of mobile positioning – tracking

480-665: A " keyboard bar " form factor, like the BlackBerry line, Windows Mobile smartphones, Palm Treos , and some of the Nokia Eseries . A few hid their full physical QWERTY keyboard in a sliding form factor , like the Danger Hiptop line. Some even had only a numeric keypad using T9 text input , like the Nokia Nseries and other models in the Nokia Eseries . Resistive touchscreens with stylus -based interfaces could still be found on

576-504: A "devices and services" company. Despite the growth of Windows Phone and the Lumia range (which accounted for nearly 90% of all Windows Phone devices sold), the platform never had significant market share in the key U.S. market, and Microsoft was unable to maintain Windows Phone's momentum in the years that followed, resulting in dwindling interest from users and app developers. After Balmer

672-431: A 3.5" capacitive touchscreen with twice the common resolution of most smartphone screens at the time , and introduced multi-touch to phones, which allowed gestures such as "pinching" to zoom in or out on photos, maps, and web pages. The iPhone was notable as being the first device of its kind targeted at the mass market to abandon the use of a stylus, keyboard, or keypad typical of contemporary smartphones, instead using

768-428: A combination of network-based and handset-based technologies for location determination. One example would be some modes of Assisted GPS , which can both use GPS and network information to compute the location. Both types of data are thus used by the telephone to make the location more accurate (i.e., A-GPS). Alternatively tracking with both systems can also occur by having the phone attain its GPS-location directly from

864-439: A dependence on third-party sources providing applications for multiple platforms. The advantages of a design with software powerful enough to support advanced applications and a large capacitive touchscreen affected the development of another smartphone OS platform, Android , with a more BlackBerry-like prototype device scrapped in favor of a touchscreen device with a slide-out physical keyboard, as Google's engineers thought at

960-451: A few smartphones, like the Palm Treos , which had dropped their handwriting input after a few early models that were available in versions with Graffiti instead of a keyboard. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a shift in smartphone interfaces away from devices with physical keyboards and keypads to ones with large finger-operated capacitive touchscreens. The first phone of any kind with

1056-405: A greater frequency in the data points created. Although less accurate, passive mobile positioning data has many benefits: it can be collected more easily compared to active mobile positioning data (requires no individual agreements), the number of people positioned can be much bigger and it can be gathered for longer periods of time. Identifying mobile device locations achieved greater precision at

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1152-404: A large capacitive touchscreen as the sole means of interaction, and led to the decline of earlier, keyboard- and keypad-focused platforms. Later, navigation keys such as the home , back , menu , task and search buttons have also been increasingly replaced by nonphysical touch keys, then virtual, simulated on-screen navigation keys, commonly with access combinations such as a long press of

1248-519: A large capacitive touchscreen was the LG Prada , announced by LG in December 2006. This was a fashionable feature phone created in collaboration with Italian luxury designer Prada with a 3" 240 x 400 pixel screen, a 2-Megapixel digital camera with 144p video recording ability, an LED flash , and a miniature mirror for self portraits. In January 2007, Apple Computer introduced the iPhone . It had

1344-464: A large touchscreen for direct finger input as its main means of interaction. The iPhone's operating system was also a shift away from older operating systems (which older phones supported and which were adapted from PDAs and feature phones ) to an operative system powerful enough to not require using a limited, stripped down web browser that can only render pages specially formatted using technologies such as WML , cHTML , or XHTML and instead ran

1440-455: A lesser extent, handheld video game consoles , e-reader devices, pocket calculators , and GPS tracking units . Since the early 2010s, improved hardware and faster wireless communication (due to standards such as LTE and later 5G NR) have bolstered the growth of the smartphone industry . As of 2014, over a billion smartphones are sold globally every year. In 2019 alone, 1.54 billion smartphone units were shipped worldwide. 75.05 percent of

1536-481: A limited amount of cellular Internet access. PDA and mobile phone manufacturers competed in reducing the size of devices. The bulk of these smartphones combined with their high cost and expensive data plans, plus other drawbacks such as expansion limitations and decreased battery life compared to separate standalone devices, generally limited their popularity to " early adopters " and business users who needed portable connectivity. In March 1996, Hewlett-Packard released

1632-752: A major partnership with Microsoft, under which it would exclusively use Windows Phone on all of its future smartphones, and integrate Microsoft's Bing search engine and Bing Maps (which, as part of the partnership, would also license Nokia Maps data) into all future devices. The announcement led to the abandonment of both Symbian, as well as MeeGo —a Linux-based mobile platform it was co-developing with Intel. Nokia's low-end Lumia 520 saw strong demand and helped Windows Phone gain niche popularity in some markets, overtaking BlackBerry in global market share in 2013. In mid-June 2012, Meizu released its mobile operating system, Flyme OS . Many of these attempts to compete with Android and iPhone were short-lived. Over

1728-420: A mobile device initiates a location area update, a database (such as Visitor Location Register ) stores the corresponding location area code. Every time a subscriber uses services like calling, messaging or mobile internet , different records are generated. The main attributes that characterise mobile positioning data are the following: Passive mobile positioning data can be divided into three categories from

1824-410: A mobile phone can be determined using client software installed on the handset. This technique determines the location of the handset by putting its location by cell identification, signal strengths of the home and neighboring cells, which is continuously sent to the carrier. In addition, if the handset is also equipped with GPS then significantly more precise location information can be then sent from

1920-418: A phone, cell towers listen for a signal sent from the phone and negotiate which tower is best able to communicate with the phone. As the phone changes location, the antenna towers monitor the signal, and the phone is "roamed" to an adjacent tower as appropriate. By comparing the relative signal strength from multiple antenna towers, a general location of a phone can be roughly determined. Other means make use of

2016-528: A plethora of fields that could benefit from the use of mobile positioning, such as urban and transportation planning, traffic flow monitoring, event planning (concerts, sports, festivals), safety and security (risk analyses based on the number of people at a specific location at a specific time), transportation origin-destination matrices, tourism and place marketing, epidemiology (geographic spreading of infectious diseases), and monitoring of hotspots (gathering places for tourists and residents). Much of this research

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2112-400: A precision of down to 50 meters in urban areas where mobile traffic and density of antenna towers (base stations) is sufficiently high. Rural and desolate areas may see miles between base stations and therefore determine locations less precisely. GSM localization uses multilateration to determine the location of GSM mobile phones, or dedicated trackers, usually with the intent to locate

2208-523: A redesigned user interface, support for gestures such as pinch-to-zoom, and a new web browser based on the same WebKit rendering engine used by the iPhone. The following year, RIM released BlackBerry OS 7 and new models in the Bold and Torch ranges, which included a new Bold with a touchscreen alongside its keyboard, and the Torch 9860—the first BlackBerry phone to not include a physical keyboard. In 2013, it replaced

2304-416: A rotary knob ring around the lens and a tripod mount. While screen sizes have increased, manufacturers have attempted to make smartphones thinner at the expense of utility and sturdiness, since a thinner frame is more vulnerable to bending and has less space for components, namely battery capacity. The iPhone and later touchscreen-only Android devices together popularized the slate form factor , based on

2400-415: A service provider's point of view, is that they can be implemented non-intrusively without affecting handsets. Network-based techniques were developed many years prior to the widespread availability of GPS on handsets. (See US 5519760 , issued 21 May 1996   for one of the first works relating to this.) The technology of locating is based on measuring power levels and antenna patterns and uses

2496-406: A smartphone app. The inclusion of GPS receivers on smartphones has made geographical apps nearly ubiquitous on these devices. Specific applications include: In January 2019, the location of her iPhone as determined by her sister helped Boston police find kidnapping victim Olivia Ambrose. Locating or positioning touches upon delicate privacy issues, since it enables someone to check where a person

2592-631: A subject of great interest for researchers and it was first introduced as the Social Positioning Method (SPM) in 2004. The method was developed by the Department of Geography of the University of Tartu , with professor Rein Ahas at the head and the company Positium , who also carried out the first research employing that method. SPM-based research focused on social flows in time and space by analysing

2688-571: A version of Apple's Safari browser that could render full websites not specifically designed for mobile phones. Later Apple shipped a software update that gave the iPhone a built-in on-device App Store allowing direct wireless downloads of third-party software. This kind of centralized App Store and free developer tools quickly became the new main paradigm for all smartphone platforms for software development , distribution , discovery, installation , and payment, in place of expensive developer tools that required official approval to use and

2784-421: Is conducted on the basis of identifying meaningful locations, such as home and work anchor points, with the help of passive mobile positioning data. Some domain-specific examples of MPD use include the following: Mobile positioning data can be used in the production of official statistics. As at 2021, there are two countries in the world where statistics providers use passive mobile positioning data as part of

2880-457: Is said to have better spatial and temporal precision than regular tourism statistics. The precision of antennae offers more perspectives of research than accommodation statistics does. Digital records on the movements of tourists make it possible to analyse their space-time behaviour. This allows the linking of routes used by tourists with the places they visited and the connecting of sites of interest with points of entry or with final destinations in

2976-487: Is spatially more precise in densely populated urban areas and near highways due to a larger number of cell towers, but in the countryside, for example, the accuracy is lower. Moreover, the accuracy of passive mobile positioning is limited to the coverage area of network cells, which can range from a few hundred metres to multiple kilometres. Mobile positioning technology in general might create fears that people's locations and activities are being monitored from away. Many of

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3072-403: Is the installation of embedded hardware or software on the handset by the manufacturers, e.g., Enhanced Observed Time Difference (E-OTD). This avenue has not made significant headway, due to the difficulty of convincing different manufacturers to cooperate on a common mechanism and to address the cost issue. Another difficulty would be to address the issue of foreign handsets that are roaming in

3168-426: Is the necessity of installing software on the handset. It requires the active cooperation of the mobile subscriber as well as software that must be able to handle the different operating systems of the handsets. Typically, smartphones , such as one based on Symbian , Windows Mobile , Windows Phone , BlackBerry OS , iOS , or Android , would be able to run such software, e.g. Google Maps. One proposed work-around

3264-565: Is usually given the same protection as the communication itself. In the United States , there is a limited constitutional guarantee on the privacy of telecommunications through the Fourth Amendment . The use of location data is further limited by statutory , administrative , and case law . Police access of seven days of a citizen's location data is unquestionably enough to be a fourth amendment search requiring both probable cause and

3360-430: Is usually relatively small and although censuses cover the whole population and contain detailed information, they are not held frequently. Thus the data from questionnaires can be gathered only in some discrete moments in time. The collection of MPD, however, is continuous and can cover the majority of the population. Also, since passive mobile positioning data is collected continuously by mobile network operators, it offers

3456-441: Is without the person's consent. Strict ethics and security measures are strongly recommended for services that employ positioning. In 2012 Malte Spitz held a TED talk on the issue of mobile phone privacy in which he showcased his own stored data that he received from Deutsche Telekom after suing the company. He described the data, which consists of 35,830 lines of data collected during the span of Germany 's data retention at

3552-586: The J-SH04 , a Sharp J-Phone model sold in Japan in November 2000. It could instantly transmit pictures via cell phone telecommunication . By the mid-2000s, higher-end cell phones commonly had integrated digital cameras. In 2003 camera phones outsold stand-alone digital cameras, and in 2006 they outsold film and digital stand-alone cameras. Five billion camera phones were sold in five years, and by 2007 more than half of

3648-1028: The Japanese market , such as mobile payments and shopping, near-field communication (NFC) allowing mobile wallet functionality to replace smart cards for transit fares, loyalty cards, identity cards, event tickets, coupons, money transfer, etc., downloadable content like musical ringtones , games , and comics , and 1seg mobile television . Phones built by Japanese manufacturers used custom firmware , however, and did not yet feature standardized mobile operating systems designed to cater to third-party application development , so their software and ecosystems were akin to very advanced feature phones . As with other feature phones, additional software and services required partnerships and deals with providers. The degree of integration between phones and carriers, unique phone features, non-standardized platforms, and tailoring to Japanese culture made it difficult for Japanese manufacturers to export their phones, especially when demand

3744-580: The Nokia 9000 Communicator , a digital cellular PDA based on the Nokia 2110 with an integrated system based on the PEN/GEOS 3.0 operating system from Geoworks . The two components were attached by a hinge in what became known as a clamshell design , with the display above and a physical QWERTY keyboard below. The PDA provided e-mail ; calendar, address book, calculator and notebook applications; text-based Web browsing; and could send and receive faxes. When closed,

3840-553: The Nokia N8 , Sony Ericsson Satio , and Samsung M8910 Pixon12 feature phone had 12 MP. The main camera of the 2009 Nokia N86 uniquely features a three-level aperture lens. The Altek Leo, a 14-megapixel smartphone with 3x optical zoom lens and 720p HD video camera was released in late 2010. In 2011, the same year the Nintendo 3DS was released, HTC unveiled the Evo 3D , a 3D phone with

3936-551: The OmniGo 700LX , a modified HP 200LX palmtop PC with a Nokia 2110 mobile phone piggybacked onto it and ROM -based software to support it. It had a 640 × 200 resolution CGA compatible four-shade gray-scale LCD screen and could be used to place and receive calls, and to create and receive text messages, emails and faxes. It was also 100% DOS 5.0 compatible, allowing it to run thousands of existing software titles, including early versions of Windows . In August 1996, Nokia released

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4032-553: The Pre 3 and HP TouchPad tablet. As part of a proposed divestment of its consumer business to focus on enterprise software, HP abruptly ended development of future webOS devices in August 2011, and sold the rights to webOS to LG Electronics in 2013, for use as a smart TV platform. Research in Motion introduced the vertical-sliding BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry OS 6 in 2010, which featured

4128-627: The exponential scaling and miniaturization of MOS transistors down to sub-micron levels ( Moore's law ), the improved lithium-ion battery , faster digital mobile data networks ( Edholm's law ), and more mature software platforms that allowed mobile device ecosystems to develop independently of data providers . In the 2000s, NTT DoCoMo 's i-mode platform, BlackBerry , Nokia 's Symbian platform, and Windows Mobile began to gain market traction, with models often featuring QWERTY keyboards or resistive touchscreen input and emphasizing access to push email and wireless internet . In

4224-479: The installed base of all mobile phones were camera phones. Sales of separate cameras peaked in 2008. Many early smartphones did not have cameras at all, and earlier models that had them had low performance and insufficient image and video quality that could not compete with budget pocket cameras and fulfill user's needs. By the beginning of the 2010s almost all smartphones had an integrated digital camera. The decline in sales of stand-alone cameras accelerated due to

4320-413: The internet , business applications, mobile payments , and multimedia functionality, including music, video, gaming , radio , and television . Smartphones typically contain a number of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) chips, include various sensors that can be leveraged by pre-installed and third-party software (such as a magnetometer , a proximity sensor , a barometer ,

4416-433: The satellites , and then having the information sent via the network to the person that is trying to locate the telephone. Such systems include Google Maps , as well as, LTE 's OTDOA and E-CellID . There are also hybrid positioning systems which combine several different location approaches to position mobile devices by Wi-Fi , WiMAX , GSM, LTE, IP addresses , and network environment data. In order to route calls to

4512-475: The " Pocket PC " versions of what was later Windows Mobile , and the UIQ interface that was originally designed for pen-based PDAs on Symbian OS devices resulted in some early smartphones having stylus-based interfaces. These allowed for virtual keyboards and handwriting input, thus also allowing easy entry of Asian characters. By the mid-2000s, the majority of smartphones had a physical QWERTY keyboard. Most used

4608-495: The 1990s, or lithium-ion batteries used in modern smartphones. The term "smart phone" (in two words) was not coined until a year after the introduction of the Simon, appearing in print as early as 1995, describing AT&T's PhoneWriter Communicator. The term "smartphone" (as one word) was first used by Ericsson in 1997 to describe a new device concept, the GS88 . Beginning in

4704-444: The antenna pattern, which supports angular determination and phase discrimination . Newer phones may also allow the tracking of the phone even when turned on but not active in a telephone call. This results from the roaming procedures that perform hand-over of the phone from one base station to another. A phone's location can be shared with friends and family, posted to a public website, recorded locally, or shared with other users of

4800-504: The beginning of the 2000s. An important part was played by the E911 law accepted in the USA which made it mandatory to determine the original location of emergency calls. As the technical solutions of identifying a mobile phone's location developed further, different location based-services started to emerge. This possibility of observing people's movements and also their social characteristics became

4896-431: The biggest advantages of positioning data is the possibility of monitoring tourism in real time. The data can be gathered regularly and visualised in a real-time environment. Mobile positioning data has also some weaknesses, such as the fact that even this data will not represent the total population since there are also people without mobile phones (young children, the elderly, certain socio-economic groups). In addition,

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4992-473: The case of active mobile positioning data, the collection of which generally requires special permissions (consent from people being positioned) anyway. However, the obligation of asking for permission means that the sample of actively positioned people is usually small. The spatial accuracy of passive mobile positioning depends on the geographical division of the mobile network, which is not equally distributed in space. This means that passive mobile positioning

5088-483: The company announced that it would also exit the hardware market to focus more on software and its enterprise middleware, and began to license the BlackBerry brand and its Android distribution to third-party OEMs such as TCL for future devices. In September 2013, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Nokia's mobile device business for $ 7.1 billion, as part of a strategy under CEO Steve Ballmer for Microsoft to be

5184-519: The compulsion associated with a legislative framework, such as Enhanced 9-1-1 , is required before a service provider will deploy a solution. In December 2020, it emerged that the Israeli surveillance company Rayzone Group may have gained access, in 2018, to the SS7 signaling system via cellular network provider Sure Guernsey , thereby being able to track the location of any cellphone globally. The location of

5280-433: The concentration of cell base stations, with urban environments achieving the highest possible accuracy because of the higher number of cell towers , and the implementation of the most current timing methods. One of the key challenges of network-based techniques is the requirement to work closely with the service provider, as it entails the installation of hardware and software within the operator's infrastructure. Frequently

5376-458: The concept that a powered mobile phone always communicates wirelessly with one of the closest base stations , so knowledge of the location of the base station implies the cell phone is nearby. Advanced systems determine the sector in which the mobile phone is located and roughly estimate also the distance to the base station. Further approximation can be done by interpolating signals between adjacent antenna towers. Qualified services may achieve

5472-448: The concerns related to positioning data are in the privacy and surveillance fields and those issues need to be addressed and discussed very carefully. In the field of MPD, many different measures are in place to safeguard users' privacy, such as data pseduonymisation/anonymisation, whereby a subscriber's personal identity code can be modified or data can be aggregated to give anonymity to the subjects. Alongside that, sampling (decreasing

5568-530: The country etc. Space-time precision enables the investigation of single events and their geography more than had previously been possible. This allows studying the extent and impacts of events such as fairs, concerts, sports events and also managing crowds of visitors. Mobile positioning data is also touted to be suitable for studying tourism in less visited natural areas where it is difficult to use other methods such as accommodation statistics or questionnaires. The timeliness of statistics (up to near real-time) and

5664-427: The course of the decade, the two platforms became a clear duopoly in smartphone sales and market share, with BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and other operating systems eventually stagnating to little or no measurable market share. In 2015, BlackBerry began to pivot away from its in-house mobile platforms in favor of producing Android devices, focusing on a security-enhanced distribution of the software. The following year,

5760-462: The device could be used as a digital cellular telephone. In June 1999 Qualcomm released the "pdQ Smartphone", a CDMA digital PCS smartphone with an integrated Palm PDA and Internet connectivity. Subsequent landmark devices included: In 1999, Japanese wireless provider NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode , a new mobile internet platform which provided data transmission speeds up to 9.6 kilobits per second, and access web services available through

5856-515: The digital age." The Chinese government has proposed using this technology to track commuting patterns of Beijing city residents. Aggregate presence of mobile phone users could be tracked in a privacy-preserving fashion. This location data was used to locate protesters during protests in Beijing in 2022 . In Europe most countries have a constitutional guarantee on the secrecy of correspondence , and location data obtained from mobile phone networks

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5952-474: The early 1990s, IBM engineer Frank Canova realised that chip-and-wireless technology was becoming small enough to use in handheld devices . The first commercially available device that could be properly referred to as a "smartphone" began as a prototype called "Angler" developed by Canova in 1992 while at IBM and demonstrated in November of that year at the COMDEX computer industry trade show. A refined version

6048-443: The handset to the carrier. Another approach is to use a fingerprinting-based technique, where the "signature" of the home and neighboring cells signal strengths at different points in the area of interest is recorded by war-driving and matched in real-time to determine the handset location. This is usually performed independent from the carrier. The key disadvantage of handset-based techniques, from service provider's point of view,

6144-466: The iPhone; Palm unveiled a new platform known as webOS for its Palm Pre in late-2009 to replace Palm OS , which featured a focus on a task-based "card" metaphor and seamless synchronization and integration between various online services (as opposed to the then-conventional concept of a smartphone needing a PC to serve as a "canonical, authoritative repository" for user data). HP acquired Palm in 2010 and released several other webOS devices, including

6240-526: The increasing use of smartphones with rapidly improving camera technology for casual photography, easier image manipulation , and abilities to directly share photos through the use of apps and web-based services. By 2011, cell phones with integrated cameras were selling hundreds of millions per year. In 2015, digital camera sales were 35.395 million units or only less than a third of digital camera sales numbers at their peak and also slightly less than film camera sold number at their peak. Contributing to

6336-533: The legacy BlackBerry OS with a revamped, QNX -based platform known as BlackBerry 10 , with the all-touch BlackBerry Z10 and keyboard-equipped Q10 as launch devices. In 2010, Microsoft unveiled a replacement for Windows Mobile known as Windows Phone , featuring a new touchscreen-centric user interface built around flat design and typography, a home screen with "live tiles" containing feeds of updates from apps, as well as integrated Microsoft Office apps. In February 2011, Nokia announced that it had entered into

6432-402: The location coordinates of mobile phones (and also the social identification of the people carrying them). Since that method used active mobile positioning, consent from the people observed was needed. Mobile positioning data emerged as a completely new source of information and analysis in geography and social sciences. The benefit of using this kind of data was that it enabled further describing

6528-528: The location of mobile phones. Mobile positioning data can be used for generating population and tourism statistics , for measuring human mobility, creating data-driven solutions in urban planning , establishing a response plan to disasters etc. There are many ways to track the location of a mobile device in a network but this article covers mobile positioning data from network-based technologies: Compared to passive mobile positioning, active mobile positioning yields more accurate location data and provides

6624-535: The main image with a macro focus shot . In 2007 the Nokia N95 was notable as a smartphone that had a 5.0 Megapixel (MP) camera, when most others had cameras with around 3 MP or less than 2 MP. Some specialized feature phones like the LG Viewty , Samsung SGH-G800 , and Sony Ericsson K850i , all released later that year, also had 5.0 MP cameras. By 2010 5.0 MP cameras were common; a few smartphones had 8.0 MP cameras and

6720-526: The mid-to-late 1990s, many people who had mobile phones carried a separate dedicated PDA device, running early versions of operating systems such as Palm OS , Newton OS , Symbian or Windows CE / Pocket PC . These operating systems would later evolve into early mobile operating systems . Most of the "smartphones" in this era were hybrid devices that combined these existing familiar PDA OSes with basic phone hardware. The results were devices that were bulkier than either dedicated mobile phones or PDAs, but allowed

6816-527: The network. Crowdsourced Wi-Fi data can also be used to identify a handset's location. The poor performance of the GPS-based methods in indoor environment and the increasing popularity of Wi-Fi have encouraged companies to design new and feasible methods to carry out Wi-Fi-based indoor positioning. Most smartphones combine Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS and GLONASS , with Wi-Fi positioning systems . Hybrid positioning systems use

6912-574: The perspective of a mobile network operator: The digital footprint left by mobile device users is sensitive, but also highly valuable, as it provides new possibilities of measuring and monitoring the spatio-temporal activities of the population. This makes MPD a great data source for gathering statistics, as it can fill in the gaps where other data sources are lacking. Traditionally, people's location and mobility are studied via questionnaires, travel and time use surveys , censuses . This method, however, has many limitations. The sample of questionnaires

7008-671: The platform such as online shopping. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode used cHTML , a language which restricted some aspects of traditional HTML in favor of increasing data speed for the devices. Limited functionality, small screens and limited bandwidth allowed for phones to use the slower data speeds available. The rise of i-mode helped NTT DoCoMo accumulate an estimated 40 million subscribers by the end of 2001, and ranked first in market capitalization in Japan and second globally. Japanese cell phones increasingly diverged from global standards and trends to offer other forms of advanced services and smartphone-like functionality that were specifically tailored to

7104-420: The possibility for a person to be included in a dataset) and obfuscation (masking or hiding original data) could be used as alternatives or employed for further increasing the level of privacy protection. Smartphone 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

7200-413: The possibility of generating statistics on a very granular level. Furthermore, it allows producing near real-time statistics as well statistics on events that happened years ago. A number of research papers and use cases shows that mobile positioning data plays a very important role in various domains such as tourism , health, socio-economics , disaster response, urban management , etc. Authors indicate

7296-681: The possibility of producing unconfirmed quick indicators are further features provided by mobile positioning data. On the other hand, researchers might also face difficulty in assessing the quality of statistics based on MPD because the prevalence of mobile phone usage during travel is largely unknown and the methodology might not be firm. A relative lack of information on the purpose of the trip, expenditure, type of accommodation and means of transport used are also cited as common issues. Nevertheless, passive mobile positioning data has several advantages, which can substantiate its use and even open up new perspectives in tourism studies and management tools. One of

7392-446: The quality of the data. Statistics based on MPD can be compiled automatically, in some cases almost in real time, and it requires less manual labour. The job of analysing and interpreting the resulting statistical indicators is left for statisticians and researchers, but the new concept of fast and expansive data collection improves the quality of decision-making processes and results in public and private sectors. Mobile positioning data

7488-497: The regular production of official tourism statistics: Estonia and Indonesia . Eesti Pank , the central bank of Estonia, produces official tourism travel statistics based on passive mobile positioning data since 2008 and the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism produces MPD-based inbound cross-border visitor arrival statistics since 2016. For statistical purposes, mobile positioning data provides new possibilities in terms of

7584-518: The rest of the world. Phones that made effective use of any significant data connectivity were still rare outside Japan until the introduction of the Danger Hiptop in 2002, which saw moderate success among U.S. consumers as the T-Mobile Sidekick. Later, in the mid-2000s, business users in the U.S. started to adopt devices based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile , and then BlackBerry smartphones from Research In Motion . American users popularized

7680-412: The rise in popularity of smartphones being used over dedicated cameras for photography, smaller pocket cameras have difficulty producing bokeh in images, but nowadays, some smartphones have dual-lens cameras that reproduce the bokeh effect easily, and can even rearrange the level of bokeh after shooting. This works by capturing multiple images with different focus settings, then combining the background of

7776-660: The rising popularity of the iPhone in the late 2000s, the majority of smartphones have featured thin, slate-like form factors with large, capacitive touch screens with support for multi-touch gestures rather than physical keyboards. Most modern smartphones have the ability for users to download or purchase additional applications from a centralized app store . They often have support for cloud storage and cloud synchronization, and virtual assistants . Smartphones have largely replaced personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, handheld/palm-sized PCs , portable media players (PMP), point-and-shoot cameras , camcorders , and, to

7872-447: The space-time movements of the society, meaning this information could be used for research , planning and the administration of public life . A mobile positioning record is created in the database of a mobile network operator when a mobile device is communicating with the network. These records are considered passive mobile positioning data and when they are created, they are registered by different network entities. For example, when

7968-555: The standalone handset can when necessary be inserted into a tablet -sized screen unit with integrated supportive battery and used as such. In 2013 and 2014, Samsung experimented with the hybrid combination of compact camera and smartphone, releasing the Galaxy S4 Zoom and K Zoom , each equipped with integrated 10× optical zoom lens and manual parameter settings (including manual exposure and focus) years before these were widely adapted among smartphones. The S4 Zoom additionally has

8064-542: The task key to simulate a short menu key press, as with home button to search. More recent "bezel-less" types have their screen surface space extended to the unit's front bottom to compensate for the display area lost for simulating the navigation keys. While virtual keys offer more potential customizability, their location may be inconsistent among systems depending on screen rotation and software used. Multiple vendors attempted to update or replace their existing smartphone platforms and devices to better-compete with Android and

8160-467: The term "CrackBerry" in 2006 due to the BlackBerry's addictive nature. In the U.S., the high cost of data plans and relative rarity of devices with Wi-Fi capabilities that could avoid cellular data network usage kept adoption of smartphones mainly to business professionals and " early adopters ." Outside the U.S. and Japan, Nokia was seeing success with its smartphones based on Symbian , originally developed by Psion for their personal organisers, and it

8256-484: The time that a touchscreen could not completely replace a physical keyboard and buttons. Android is based around a modified Linux kernel, again providing more power than mobile operating systems adapted from PDAs and feature phones. The first Android device, the horizontal-sliding HTC Dream , was released in September 2008. In 2012, Asus started experimenting with a convertible docking system named PadFone , where

8352-451: The time, saying, "This is six months of my life [...] You can see where I am, when I sleep at night, what I'm doing." He partnered up with ZEIT Online and made his information publicly available in an interactive map which allows users to watch his entire movements during that time in fast-forward. Spitz concluded that technology consumers are the key to challenging privacy norms in today's society who "have to fight for self determination in

8448-462: The usage habits of mobile phone users can be very different, which, in the end, influences the resulting dataset. Furthermore, when using passive mobile positioning data, there is no information regarding the background of the users: their characteristics, socio-economic indicators, purpose of the trip, type of accommodation and means of transport used etc. More detailed information on these characteristics can be gathered with additional questionnaires in

8544-399: The user. The accuracy of network-based techniques varies, with cell identification being the least accurate (due to differential signals transposing between towers, otherwise known as "bouncing signals") and triangulation as moderately accurate, and newer "advanced forward link trilateration " timing methods as the most accurate. The accuracy of network-based techniques is both dependent on

8640-415: The world population were smartphone users as of 2020. Early smartphones were marketed primarily towards the enterprise market, attempting to bridge the functionality of standalone PDA devices with support for cellular telephony , but were limited by their bulky form, short battery life , slow analog cellular networks, and the immaturity of wireless data services. These issues were eventually resolved with

8736-401: Was manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric , which integrated features with its own cellular radio technologies. It featured a liquid-crystal display (LCD) and PC Card support. The Simon was commercially unsuccessful, particularly due to its bulky form factor and limited battery life , using NiCad batteries rather than the nickel–metal hydride batteries commonly used in mobile phones in

8832-435: Was marketed to consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator . In addition to placing and receiving cellular calls , the touchscreen-equipped Simon could send and receive faxes and emails . It included an address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, and notepad, as well as other visionary mobile applications such as maps, stock reports and news. The IBM Simon

8928-536: Was so high in Japan that the companies did not feel the need to look elsewhere for additional profits. The rise of 3G technology in other markets and non-Japanese phones with powerful standardized smartphone operating systems , app stores , and advanced wireless network capabilities allowed non-Japanese phone manufacturers to finally break in to the Japanese market, gradually adopting Japanese phone features like emojis , mobile payments, NFC, etc. and spreading them to

9024-756: Was succeeded by Satya Nadella (who has placed a larger focus on software and cloud computing) as CEO of Microsoft, it took a $ 7.6 billion write-off on the Nokia assets in July 2015, and laid off nearly the entire Microsoft Mobile unit in May 2016. Prior to the completion of the sale to Microsoft, Nokia released a series of Android-derived smartphones for emerging markets known as Nokia X , which combined an Android-based platform with elements of Windows Phone and Nokia's feature phone platform Asha , using Microsoft and Nokia services rather than Google. The first commercial camera phone

9120-471: Was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210 , released in Japan in May 1999. It was called a "mobile videophone" at the time, and had a 110,000- pixel front-facing camera . It could send up to two images per second over Japan's Personal Handy-phone System (PHS) cellular network , and store up to 20 JPEG digital images , which could be sent over e-mail . The first mass-market camera phone was

9216-646: Was the most popular smartphone OS in Europe during the middle to late 2000s. Initially, Nokia's Symbian smartphones were focused on business with the Eseries , similar to Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices at the time. From 2002 onwards, Nokia started producing consumer-focused smartphones, popularized by the entertainment-focused Nseries . Until 2010, Symbian was the world's most widely used smartphone operating system. The touchscreen personal digital assistant (PDA)–derived nature of adapted operating systems like Palm OS ,

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