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Most phones these days enable you to store your appointments, snap photos and listen to music. How then are smartphones differentiated from ordinary phones?
While regular phones these days can do lots more than just make calls, our research shows that smartphones too have become even smarter. The first smartphone was designed by IBM in 1992 with the name Simon. Since then the industry has grown by leaps and bounds and most mobile phone manufacturers market their versions of smartphones. Interestingly, the specifications of an average smartphone today easily eclipses by many times the speed, memory and storage of personal computers in the eighties.
Smartphones have become popular as people realized that it’s easier to carry around a smartphone compared to lugging a camera, notepad and laptop around separately. With functions like calendar, e-mail, ability to run common PC applications, smartphone users will never be unequipped. Smartphones also come with easy to use applications that will sync the information on them with PCs using cable, infrared or Bluetooth connections.
Even with all the available applications on a smartphone, users can install additional applications on the device. Among the popular applications that can be downloaded onto a smartphone are file management software, multimedia applications, productivity solutions and travel/navigation applications.
Since smartphones are essentially small PCs, they face the same risks of being hit by viruses. Users need to be careful by downloading applications only from trusted sources and also install anti virus applications.
Most smartphones have a QWERTY keyboard like Sony Ericsson P910i and Palm Treo smartphones. Others come in the form of touchscreens like the Atom and Dopod smartphones.
A prominent feature of a smartphone is its large screen size which allows it to view more content. Smartphones also come with web browsers like Opera and Windows for easy surfing of the Internet. Most of the current batch of smartphones are enabled with WiFi, 3G, EDGE and GPRS connectivity. With easy access to Internet and office applications, smartphones truly enable information at your fingertips.
Quite a few smartphones these days also come with Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking software that allows you to use mapping applications. Besides reading email, smartphones have evolved to be able to read business documents in a variety of formats such as PDF.
Cameras on smartphones usually come with high megapixels and flash backlights. One of the highest megapixel in a smartphone camera is supported by Nokia N95 that has 5 Megapixel (2592 x 1944) digital camera with capabilities to upload direct to Flickr, Carl Zeiss Optics, autofocus and digital zoom.
Operating system (OS) used by smartphones are Symbian, Linux, Windows Mobile and
Palm OS.
Among the famous Symbian OS smartphones are ranges from Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson phones. Nokia has recently come up with a vast variety of smartphones in their Nseries and ESeries. Sony Ericsson has its P–series models. Motorola is not so strong in this sector but they have offerings like the Motorola A1000, Motorola A920 and Motorola A925.
Samsung’s strategy is to have smartphones built with a variety of OS from Symbian to Windows Mobile/CE to even Palm OS. The Treo used to make Palm OS smartphones but their latest smartphone the Palm Treo 750v actually runs on Windows Mobile!
Dopod, HP, Orange and Siemens smartphones use Windows Mobile. Motorola has experimented with open source smartphones. Currently the most popular Mobile OS is the Symbian operating system.
The question that remains is the difference between a smartphone and a mobile phone. As most new models of mobile phones today have similar functionalities to smartphones such as calendars, task lists, MP3 player and camera, how else can we qualify a phone as a smartphone? Besides, most mobile phones have Java application support which allows additional applications to be installed. Yet they are not grouped as smartphones.
Thus the best way to determine a smartphone is to check the OS of the phones. If it runs on one of the above mentioned operating systems then it’s a smartphone.
 Emily is quite happy to be working in wireless-friendly Singapore. Contact her at
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