Smartphone

A smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary basic feature phone. Smartphones and feature phones may be thought of as handheld computers integrated within a mobile telephone, but while most feature phones are able to run applications based on platforms such as Java ME, a smartphone allows the user to install and run more advanced applications based on a specific platform. Smartphones run complete operating system software providing a platform for application developers. A smartphone can be considered as a Personal Pocket Computer (PPC) with mobile phone functions, because these devices are mainly computers, although quite smaller than a desktop computer (DC). Additionally a PPC (Personal Pocket Computer) is more personal than a DC (desktop computer).

Growth in demand for advanced mobile devices boasting powerful processors, abundant memory, larger screens, and open operating systems has outpaced the rest of the mobile phone market for several years. According to a study by ComScore, over 45.5 million people in the United States owned smartphones in 2010 and it is the fastest growing segment of the mobile phone market, which comprised 234 million subscribers in the United States. Despite the large increase in smartphone sales in the last few years, smartphone shipments only make up 20% of total handset shipments, as of the first half of 2010.

Rise of Symbian, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry

In 2000 Ericsson released the touchscreen smartphone R380, the first device to use the new Symbian OS. It was followed up by P800 in 2002, the first camera smartphone.

In 2001 Microsoft announced its Windows CE Pocket PC OS would be offered as "Microsoft Windows Powered Smartphone 2002." Microsoft originally defined its Windows Smartphone products as lacking a touchscreen and offering a lower screen resolution compared to its sibling Pocket PC devices.

In early 2002 Handspring released the Palm OS Treo smartphone, utilizing a full keyboard that combined wireless web browsing, email, calendar, and contact organizer with mobile third-party applications that could be downloaded or synced with a computer.

In 2002 RIM released the first BlackBerry which was the first smartphone optimized for wireless email use and had achieved a total customer base of 32 million subscribers by December 2009.

In 2007 Nokia launched the Nokia N95 which integrated a wide range of features into a consumer-oriented smartphone: GPS, a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash, 3G and wi-fi connectivity and TV-out. In the next few years these features would become standard on high-end smartphones.

Smartbook


A smartbook is a concept of a mobile device that falls between smartphones and netbooks, delivering features typically found in smartphones (always on, all-day battery life, 3G connectivity, GPS) in a slightly larger device with a full keyboard. Smartbooks will tend to be designed to work with online applications.

Smartbooks use the ARM processor, which gives them much greater battery life than a netbook which uses a traditional Intel x86 processor. They are likely to be sold initially through mobile network operators, like mobile phones are today, along with a wireless data plan.

Source : Wikipedia