How phones are 'optimized,' and why you should care (Smartphones Unlocked)

Like all phones destined for a U.S. carrier, the Nokia Lumia 920 has to pass a gauntlet of tests.

(Credit: CNET )

When you strip it all away -- the e-mail and texts, the voice navigation, and Angry Birds -- your smartphone isn't a smartphone at all. It's a radio.

And the job of a radio is to detect, receive, and maintain the signal that leashes the cell phone to the network. When you turn on your phone, it chirps out data that lets the network know that another cell phone has hopped on board.

The network authenticates the phone, and the phone is free to send and receive data or calls. In other words, more fundamentally than software and the processor, its those radios that bring the cell phone its spark of life.

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