A phone like this is basically a miniature broadcast station - it translates sound and images to electrical radio signals and broadcasts and receives these signals from a cell phone tower. Here's what's inside:

The circuit board connects all the phone parts to a series of microchips that act as the phone's brains. The main computer takes in information and tells all the different parts of the phone what to do. That information comes from you. When you press down on a button on the rubber keypad, it pushes on one of the many tabs below it. The tabs are little switches - when pressed, they complete a circuit. This tells the computer what it should do next.

When you speak into the microphone, the sound (waves of changing air pressure) moves a plastic flap. Based on this movement, the microphone generates an electrical signal representing the sound. The speaker works in exactly the opposite way. An electrical signal moves a plastic flap, which generates sound waves you can hear.

The built-in camera is very small. Light comes through a lens and forms an image on a charge coupled device -- a grid of thousands of tiny electronic light readers. Each light reader measures the light hitting it and translates it into an electrical value. Together, these electrical values add up to create a signal representing the picture that the camera sees.

The phone has two LCD screens. An LCD is a grid of thousands of "twisted" crystals that sits in front of a light source. When the crystals are twisted, they block the light and you see a blank screen. When you charge one of the crystals with electricity, it untwists to let light through. The computer generates an electrical signal that untwists some crystals to form light patterns, making pictures and text on the screen.

And here's how it all comes together:

Most of these parts either translate analog information to digital information or digital information to analog information. Analog information changes gradually, like a wave. Digital information is made up of numbers that computers can understand.

The camera breaks what it sees into tiny dots, and gives each dot a number. When another phone receives the signal, it recreates that image on the LCD by translating each number back into a dot.

The phone chops speech into small sections. It assigns each section a number and broadcasts that digital signal. The phone on the other end of the call uses this digital signal to drive the speaker, recreating the original sound.