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

Irritating things can happen when phones and networks aren't perfectly in sync. Here's how the two keep that from happening.

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

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.

Like all things in tech, the task of connecting a hunk of plastic and metal to an invisible network is easier said than done.

First, there are the practical issues to consider: Is this a GSM or CDMA network, LTE, HSPA+, 3G, or all three? Which radio frequency bands will the phone use to draw network resources?

Then there are the detailed technical issues, the standards and specifications that the FCC requires all handset-makers to pass.

Follow this with the carrier's own to-do list, supported by weeks of testing and tweaking to get each handset right, and you start getting a sense for what it takes to get a new phone up and running on an established carrier.

Not optimized, validated

On my side of the industry, we often use the word "optimize" to describe the relationship between a phone and its network.

More often than not, the term takes on a negative tone, warning consumers when a phone is not optimized; when, although you can use it, it was never intended for U.S. markets. As in, "This phone may not be as fast as you want; it hasn't been optimized for a U.S. carrier."

On the other side of the industry -- that space occupied by wireless carriers and handset-makers -- "optimize" doesn't regularly enter into daily parlance. Instead, "validation" is the word most often tossed around.

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