Today, there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of repeaters (or more) and more cell phone towers everywhere, it's virtually impossible to go anywhere on the planet where you can't get a signal. In areas where signals are weak on normal cell phones you can find a GPS satellite phone that doesn't use the repeaters or cell towers at all- it literally bounces a strong signal out to the satellite in space and uses IT to broker the phone call connection.
Chances of needing a satellite phone for most people is very low and the network has been slowly getting faster and faster to the point of a 4th generation of network updates (where technology is completely updated to a new version, new equipment, and a much faster connection speed through the air). Smart phones are as powerful today as computers were in the year 2000. That's just the lower end ones. The high end smartphone is as powerful if not more powerful than today's latest computer technologies.
Chances of needing a satellite phone for most people is very low and the network has been slowly getting faster and faster to the point of a 4th generation of network updates (where technology is completely updated to a new version, new equipment, and a much faster connection speed through the air). Smart phones are as powerful today as computers were in the year 2000. That's just the lower end ones. The high end smartphone is as powerful if not more powerful than today's latest computer technologies.
With a smartphone you can do just about anything you can do on your PC. You will have to do it in a slightly different way of course but you have access to anything you can access on a computer. Cell phones now come with extendable features like hard drive space in the form of a memory card or MicroSD which can hold up to 32 gigs of data, music/mp3, videos (television shows, movies, and even flash movies!).
The dream of video conferencing everyone had since the Jetsons and many other futuristic televisions shows came on is realized today but ironically not many people actually use it! Smartphones come with two cameras now, one in front one in back so you can video conference and still see who your talking to through their camera.Thousands of apps, many free, are available to download from the Android Market to further customize.Photo Sharing apps are also pre-installed, to make it easy to record videos and snap photos with the advanced 5 megapixel camera/ camcorder and share your favorites online or via multimedia messaging.
Overall, the smart phone is powerful, efficient, and a pretty amazing piece of technology. It's getting better too!
We all know this is only the beginnings of the smart phone technology it's only going to get better and batter the possibilities are endless so get ready for the ride.