The amount of technology involved in a modern 'smart phone' is truly prodigious. The GPS subsystem itself is remarkable, with gains involved of perhaps 150 dB (which enables even an _indoor_ cellphone to 'hear' the GPS satellites). Thar's also 'general relativity' in thar! Precise GPS positioning requires corrections based on general relativity. The signal processing involved in the sending & receiving the data is also prodigious. In addition to the amount of processing involved in the cellphone itself, you also have the amount of processing in the 'base station', which can be anything from a large box on a tall tower, to a little tiny thing that sits (I understand) on top of a phone booth (whatever that is!) Modern base station technology includes multiple radios, 'smart antennas' (which can do some version of 'beam-steering' -- essentially pointing an antenna at your cellphone, but doing so electronically instead of mechanically), etc. Much of this processing and the proliferation of base stations enable high speed communication _at very low radiated power levels_. My first cellphone was in my car in the 1980's and could do 3-4 watts of power. I think that most cellphones now use only perhaps 100 milliwatts, and far less than that when the base station is nearby. The processing of the cellphone camera is also pretty impressive. Those little boxes that show you where people's faces are require a huge amount of processing. Also, the 'video compression' algorithms for cellphone video require huge amounts of processing. I'll leave it to others on this list to comment on the amount of processing power required by various agencies to then monitor & store all of this data in the name of 'protecting' us. At 12:03 AM 7/5/2013, Simon Plouffe wrote:

So here is my question, in this example, how much computation is needed to perform the call first and then the sending and reception of the mms message containing the photo with the gps location : can this be evaluated ??