Smartphones combine the technology and versatility of cell phones, game consoles, PDAs, and personal computers into one portable device. The biggest advantage of a smartphone is the availability of thousands of applications that allow the user to customize and personalize their phone. There are many applications available that can be downloaded from online stores.
Smartphones offer a complete Internet experience. You can surf the Internet, chat with your friends, or watch videos on YouTube.
Two decades ago there were mobile phones and PDAs or Personal Digital Assistants. People would use cell phones to make calls and PDAs to store contact information. Eventually, PDAs got a little smarter by giving them wireless connectivity and being able to send and receive emails. Advances in PDAs and cell phones contributed a lot to the development of smartphones. PDAs merged with mobile phones along with some additional features and the result was a smartphone.
Some smartphone features
Smartphone is based on some kind of operating system that allows it to run applications that can be native or third party. For example, Iphone uses iOs and Blackberry uses Blackberry OS.
- Your smartphone has built-in applications to easily perform tasks, such as the ability to edit documents, view PDF files, edit photos, take pictures, listen to music, and watch videos.
- It has a built-in browser to surf the web at higher speeds on 3G and 4G networks. You can browse the web using your wi-fi router with built-in wi-fi support.
- It has QWERTY keyboard which can be in hardware i.e. physical keys and can be in software i.e. touch screen format.
- You can take photos with the built-in camera and even capture videos in high quality.
Some of the main operating systems used in smartphones
Symbian: The Ericsson R380 smartphone was the first device to use the Symbian operating system. Later Nokia used this operating system in its Communicator and future mobiles. Symbian was the number one operating system platform for smartphones until 2011, but the huge popularity of Google’s Android relegated it to second place.
iOS: Apple released its first iPhone in 2007 and it was based on iOS, its native operating system. The major version of iOS i.e. iOS 4 was released in 2010 and included third-party app multitasking, HD video recording and 5MP camera.
Blackberry: RIM released its first Blackberry device in 2002, which has built-in phone functionality and email capabilities.
android: Android is an open source platform primarily developed by Google and supported by a variety of hardware and software developers such as Intel, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola.