[giantrobot]

Why would cellular lose its "cell" meaning? The radios are still cellular which means a small geographic space in served by a particular directional physical antenna(s).

Your phone only needs to be able to hit the antenna in its cell. It doesn't need to talk to other phones or more distant antennas. This is what allows phones have have relatively low power radios that reside in your pocket without big external antennas.

[867-5309]

TIL "cellular" refers to the imagined interconnecting shapes when mapped, not the battery technology as previously thought. unsure why this term was popularised over the pre-existing "mobile" but there we go

[giantrobot]

Way, way, way back in the day there was Mobile Telephone Service [0]. Instead of a cellular network it was just a two-way VHF radio. MTS was operator dialed which meant you picked up your end in the car and an operator dialed a landline and patched it through to the radio. When cellular phones debuted in the 80s they were described as such to distinguish them from MTS phones.

The MTS phones needed a whole channel assigned to a phone which was dedicated in the whole service area. Cellular systems allowed geographic channel reuse so you could have a lot more users in a given area.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Telephone_Service

[kzrdude]

I think that we should just use the word "phone" from now on, we don't need to say "cell" or "cell phone", this is the just the phone. Even though it has a lot more jobs as a smartphone, messaging and communication generally is still the main job.