Smartphones combine the technology & versatility of cell phones, gaming consoles, PDAs, and personal computers into one handheld device. The greatest advantage of a smartphone is the availability of thousand of applications that allow a user to customize and personalize his or her phone. There are many applications available which can be downloaded from online stores.
Smartphones offer a complete Internet experience. You can browse the internet, chat with your friends or watch videos on YouTube.
Two decades ago there were cell phones and PDAs or Personal Digital Assistants. People would use cell phones for making calls and PDAs to store contact information. Eventually, PDAs were made a little smart by giving them wireless connectivity and they were able to send and receive email messages. The advancements in PDAs and Cellphones contributed a lot in the development of Smartphone. PDAs were merged with Cellphones along with some extra features and the result was a Smartphone.
Some Features of Smartphone
Smartphone is based on some type 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.
- Smartphone has built in applications to carry out the tasks easily like ability to edit documents, view pdf files, edit photos, take pictures, listen music and watch videos.
- It has built in browser to surf the web at higher speeds on 3G and 4G Networks. You can surf web using your wi-fi router with built in wi-fi support.
- It has QWERTY keyboard that can be in hardware i.e physical keys and can be in software i.e touchscreen format.
- You can take pictures using built in Camera and even capture videos in high quality.
Some Major Operating System Used In Smartphone
Symbian: Ericsson R380 Smartphone was the first device that used Symbian OS. Later Nokia used this operating system in their Communicator and future mobiles. Symbian was the number one OS platform for Smartphone until 2011 but huge popularity of Google’s Android dropped it to second place.
iOS: Apple launched its first iPhone in 2007 and it was based on iOS their native OS. Major version of iOS ie iOS 4 was released in 2010 that included third party application multitasking, HD video recording and 5MP Camera.
Blackberry: RIM released their first Blackberry device in 2002 which has integrated phone functionality and email capability.
Android: Android is Open Source platform mainly developed by Google and supported by variety of hardware and software developers like Intel, HTC, Samsung and Motorola.