Smartphone

Modern smartphones.

A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone.^[1][2][3] The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone or camera phone. Today's models also serve to combine the functions of portable media players, low-end compact digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and GPS navigation units. Modern smartphones typically also include high-resolution touchscreens, web browsers that can access, and properly display, standard web pages rather than just mobile-optimized sites, and high-speed data access via Wi-Fi.

The most common mobile operating systems (OS) used by modern smartphones include Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS, and embedded Linux distributions such as Maemo and MeeGo. Such operating systems can be installed on many different phone models, and typically each device can receive multiple OS software updates over its lifetime.

The distinction between smartphones and feature phones can be vague and there is no official definition for what constitutes the difference between them. One of the most significant differences is that the advanced application programming interfaces (APIs) on smartphones for running third-party applications^[4] can allow those applications to have better integration with the phone's OS and hardware than is typical with feature phones. In comparison, feature phones more commonly run on proprietary firmware, with third-party software support through platforms such as Java ME or BREW.

History

Early years

The first smartphone was the IBM Simon; it was designed in 1992 and shown as a concept product^[5] that year at COMDEX, the computer industry trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was released to the public in 1993 and sold by BellSouth. Besides being a mobile phone, it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail client, the ability to send and receive faxes, and games. It had no physical buttons, instead customers used a touchscreen to select telephone numbers with a finger or create faxes and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with a unique on-screen "predictive" keyboard. By today's standards, the Simon would be a fairly low-end product, lacking a camera and the ability to download third-party applications. However, its feature set at the time was highly advanced.

The Nokia Communicator line was the first of Nokia's smartphones starting with the Nokia 9000, released in 1996. This distinctive palmtop computer style smartphone was the result of a collaborative effort of an early successful and costly personal digital assistant (PDA) by Hewlett-Packard combined with Nokia's best-selling phone around that time, and early prototype models had the two devices fixed via a hinge(шарнир). The Communicators are characterized by a clamshell(захватывающий) design, with a feature phone display, keyboard and user interface on top of the phone, and a physical QWERTY keyboard, high-resolution display of at least 640×200 pixels and PDA user interface under the flip-top. The software was based on the GEOS V3.0 operating system, featuring email communication and text-based web browsing. In 1998, it was followed by Nokia 9110, and in 2000 by Nokia 9110i, with improved web browsing capability.

In 1997 the term 'smartphone' was used for the first time when Ericsson unveiled(представили) the concept phone GS88,^[6][7] the first device labelled as 'smartphone'.^[8]