what is smartphone

 Smartphone

A smartphone is a handheld personal computer with a mobile operating system and an integrated mobile broadband cellular network connection for voice, SMS, and Internet data communication; most, if not all, smartphones also support Wi-Fi. Smartphones are typically pocket-sized, as opposed to tablet computers, which are much larger.

 

The first smartphone was IBM's Simon, which was presented as a concept device -- rather than a consumer device -- at the 1992 COMDEX computer trade show. It was capable of sending emails and faxes, as well as keeping a calendar of events for the user, as opposed to simply making calls and sending messages.
Consumer smartphones evolved away from personal digital assistants (PDAs) around the turn of the 21^st century when devices such as the PalmPilot began to include wireless connectivity. Several manufacturers, including Nokia and Hewlett Packard, released devices in 1996 that were combinations of PDAs and typical cellphones that included early operating systems (OSes) and web browsing capabilities. BlackBerry released its first smartphones in the mid-2000s, and they became very popular with consumers and in the enterprise.
Many of these early smartphones featured physical keyboards.

Get to know the features that make up a smartphone.

In 2007, LG released the Prada and Apple released the iPhone, the first smartphones to feature a touchscreen. HTC released its Dream smartphone a year later, which was the first to include Google's Android OS.
Smartphones are able to run a variety of software components, known as “apps”. Most basic apps (e.g. event calendar, camera, web browser) come pre-installed with the system, while others are available for download from official sources like the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Apps can receive bug fixes and gain additional functionality through software updates; similarly, operating systems are able to update. Mobile payment is now a feature of most smartphones.
Modern smartphones have a touchscreen color display with a graphical user interface that covers the front surface and enables the user to use a virtual keyboard to type and press onscreen icons to activate apps.
Today, smartphones largely fulfill their users' needs for a telephone, digital camera and video camera, GPS navigation, a media player, clock, news, calculator, web browser, handheld video game player, flashlight, compass, an address book, note-taking, digital messaging, an event calendar, etc. Typical smartphones will include one or more of the following sensors: magnetometer, proximity sensor, barometer, gyroscope, or accelerometer. Since 2010, smartphones have adopted integrated virtual assistants, such as Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, BlackBerry Assistant and Samsung Bixby. Most smartphones produced from 2012 onward have high-speed mobile broadband 4G LTE.
In 1999, the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones to achieve mass adoption within a country.Smartphones sales started to grow rapidly by the late 2000s. In the third quarter of 2012, one billion smartphones were in use worldwide.Global smartphone sales surpassed the sales figures for feature phones in early 2013.

History

Forerunner

IBM Simon and charging base (1994).

The first commercially available device that could be properly referred to as a "smartphone" began as a prototype called "Angler" developed by Frank Canova in 1992 while at IBM and demonstrated in November of that year at the COMDEX computer industry trade show.A refined version was marketed to consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator. In addition to placing and receiving cellular calls, the touchscreen-equipped Simon could send and receive faxes and emails. It included an address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, and notepad, as well as other visionary mobile applications such as maps, stock reports and news.The term "smart phone" or "smartphone" was not coined until a year after the introduction of the Simon, appearing in print as early as 1995, describing AT&T's PhoneWriter Communicator.

Early integration of data signals with telephony

The first caller identification receiver (1971).

The first integration of data signals with telephony was conceptualized by Nikola Tesla in 1909 and pioneered by Theodore Paraskevakos beginning in 1968 with his work on transmission of electronic data through telephone lines. In 1971, while he was working with Boeing in Huntsville, Alabama, Paraskevakos demonstrated a transmitter and receiver that provided additional ways to communicate with remote equipment. This formed the original basis for what is now known as caller ID. The first caller ID equipment was installed at Peoples' Telephone Company in Leesburg, Alabama and was demonstrated to several telephone companies. The original and historic working models are still in the possession of Paraskevakos.

PDA/phone hybrids

Main article: Personal digital assistant

In the mid-late 1990s, many people who had mobile phones carried a separate dedicated PDA device, running early versions of operating systems such as Palm OS, Newton OS, Symbian or Windows CE/Pocket PC. These operating systems would later evolve into early mobile operating systems. Most of the "smartphones" in this era were hybrid devices that combined these existing familiar PDA OSes with basic phone hardware. The results were devices that were bulkier than either dedicated mobile phones or PDAs, but allowed a limited amount of cellular Internet access. The trend at the time, however, that manufacturers competed on in both mobile phones and PDAs was to make devices smaller and slimmer. The bulk of these smartphones combined with their high cost and expensive data plans, plus other drawbacks such as expansion limitations and decreased battery life compared to separate standalone devices, generally limited their popularity to "early adopters" and business users who needed portable connectivity.
In March 1996, Hewlett-Packard released the OmniGo 700LX, a modified HP 200LX palmtop PC with a Nokia 2110 mobile phone piggybacked onto it and ROM-based software to support it. It had a 640×200 resolution CGA compatible four-shade gray-scale LCD screen and could be used to place and receive calls, and to create and receive text messages, emails and faxes. It was also 100% DOS 5.0 compatible, allowing it to run thousands of existing software titles, including early versions of Windows.

The Nokia 9000 Communicator (right) and the updated 9110 model (left)

In August 1996, Nokia released the Nokia 9000 Communicator, a digital cellular PDA based on the Nokia 2110 with an integrated system based on the PEN/GEOS 3.0 operating system from Geoworks. The two components were attached by a hinge in what became known as a clamshell design, with the display above and a physical QWERTY keyboard below. The PDA provided e-mail; calendar, address book, calculator and notebook applications; text-based Web browsing; and could send and receive faxes. When closed, the device could be used as a digital cellular telephone.
In June 1999 Qualcomm released the "pdQ Smartphone", a CDMA digital PCS smartphone with an integrated Palm PDA and Internet connectivity.
Subsequent landmark devices included:

• The Ericsson R380 (2000) by Ericsson Mobile Communications. The first device marketed as a "smartphone", it was the first Symbian-based phone, with PDA functionality and limited Web browsing on a resistive touchscreen utilizing a stylus. Users could not install their own software on the device, however.
• The Kyocera 6035 (early 2001), a dual-nature device with a separate Palm OS PDA operating system and CDMA mobile phone firmware. It supported limited Web browsing with the PDA software treating the phone hardware as an attached modem.
• Handspring's Treo 180 (2002), the first smartphone that fully integrated the Palm OS on a GSM mobile phone having telephony, SMS messaging and Internet access built in to the OS. The 180 model had a thumb-type keyboard and the 180g version had a Graffiti handwriting recognition area, instead.

Mass adoption in Japan

In 1999, the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones to achieve mass adoption within a country. These phones ran on i-mode, which provided data transmission speeds up to 9.6 kbit/s. Unlike future generations of wireless services, NTT DoCoMo's i-mode used cHTML, a language which restricted some aspects of traditional HTML in favor of increasing data speed for the devices. Limited functionality, small screens and limited bandwidth allowed for phones to use the slower data speeds available.The rise of i-mode helped NTT DoCoMo accumulate an estimated 40 million subscribers by the end of 2001. It was also ranked first in market capitalization in Japan and second globally. This power would later wane in the face of the rise of 3G and new phones with advanced wireless network capabilities.

Early smartphones outside Japan

Several BlackBerry smartphones, which were highly popular in the mid-late 2000s.

Smartphones were still rare outside Japan until the introduction of the Danger Hiptop in 2002, which saw moderate success among U.S. consumers as the T-Mobile Sidekick. Later, in the mid-2000s, business users in the U.S. started to adopt devices based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and then BlackBerry smartphones from Research In Motion. American users popularized the term "CrackBerry" in 2006 due to the BlackBerry's addictive nature.
Outside the U.S. and Japan, Nokia was seeing success with its smartphones based on Symbian, originally developed by Psion for their personal organisers, and it was the most popular smartphone OS in Europe during the middle to late 2000s. Initially, Nokia's Symbian smartphones were focused on business with the Eseries, similar to Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices at the time. From 2006 onwards, Nokia started producing consumer-focused smartphones, popularized by the entertainment-focused Nseries. In Asia, with the exception of Japan, the trend was similar to that of Europe. Until 2010, Symbian was the world's most widely used smartphone operating system.

Form factor shift

The original Apple iPhone. Its introduction contributed to the steady rise of smartphones that feature large touchscreen interfaces without physical keypads.

In the early to mid-2000s, it was common for smartphones to have a physical T9 numeric keypad or QWERTY keyboard in either a candybar or sliding form factor. At that time, many smartphones had resistive touchscreens, which allowed for input with a stylus in addition to fingers, thus allowing the entry of Asian characters.Keyboards were also common for smartphones in the late-2000s.
In 2007, the LG Prada was the first mobile phone released with a large capacitive touchscreen.Later that year, Apple Inc. introduced the iPhone, which used a multi-touch capacitive touch screen.Such phones were notable for abandoning the use of a stylus, keyboard, or keypad typical for smartphones at the time up till the early 2010s, in favor of a capacitive touchscreen for direct finger input as its only input type. The iPhone was "not a smartphone by conventional terms, being that a smartphone is a platform device that allows software to be installed",until the opening of Apple's App Store a year later, which became a common means for smartphone software distribution and installation.
In October 2008, the first phone to use Google's Android operating system, called the HTC Dream (also known as the T-Mobile G1), was released. It was also a smartphone with a large multi-touch touchscreen, but still retained a slide-out physical keyboard. Later versions of Android added and then improved on-screen keyboard support, and physical keyboards on Android devices quickly became rare. Although Android's adoption was relatively slow at first, it started to gain widespread popularity in 2012, and in early 2012 dominated the smartphone market share worldwide, which continues to this day.
The iPhone and Android phones with their capacitive touchscreens popularized the smartphone form factor based on a large capacitive touchscreen and led to the decline of earlier, keyboard- and keypad-focused platforms. Microsoft, for instance, discontinued Windows Mobile and started a new touchscreen-oriented OS from scratch, called Windows Phone. Nokia abandoned Symbian and partnered with Microsoft to use Windows Phone on its smartphones. Windows Phone became the third-most-popular smartphone OS, before being replaced by Windows 10 Mobile, which declined in share to become "largely irrelevant" at less than 0.5% of the smartphone market. Palm replaced their Palm OS with webOS, which was bought by Hewlett-Packard and later sold to LG Electronics for use on LG smart TVs. BlackBerry Limited, formerly known as Research In Motion, made a new platform based on QNX, BlackBerry 10, with which it was possible to control a device without having to press any physical buttons; this platform was later discontinued.
By the mid-2010s, almost all smartphones were touchscreen-only, and Android and iPhone smartphones dominated the market since smartphones started to grow in use by 2012 and 2013.

Technological developments in the 2010s

Wikipedia homepages are shown on smartphones

In 2013, Fairphone launched its first "socially ethical" smartphone at the London Design Festival to address concerns regarding the sourcing of materials in the manufacturing.In late 2013, QSAlpha commenced production of a smartphone designed entirely around security, encryption and identity protection. Some companies began to release smartphones incorporating flexible displays to create curved form factors, such as the Samsung Galaxy Round and LG G Flex.
In October 2013, Motorola Mobility announced Project Ara, a concept for a modular smartphone platform that would allow users to customize and upgrade their phones with add-on modules that attached magnetically to a frame.Ara was retained by Google following its sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, but was shelved in 2016.That year, LG and Motorola both unveiled smartphones featuring a limited form of modularity for accessories; the LG G5 allowed accessories to be installed via the removal of its battery compartment,while the Moto Z utilizes accessories attached magnetically to the rear of the device.
By 2014, 1440p displays began to appear on high-end smartphones. In 2015, Sony released the Xperia Z5 Premium, featuring a 4K resolution display, although only images and videos could actually be rendered at that resolution (all other software is upscaled from 1080p). Microsoft, expanding upon the concept of Motorola's short-lived "Webtop", unveiled functionality for its Windows 10 operating system for phones that allows supported devices to be docked for use with a PC-styled desktop environment.Other major technologies began to trend in 2016, including a focus on virtual reality and augmented reality experiences catered towards smartphones, the newly introduced USB-C connector, and improving LTE technologies.As of 2015, the global median for smartphone ownership was 43%.Statista has forecast that 2.87 billion people will own smartphones in 2020.
The first mobile phone with a fingerprint scanner was the Toshiba G500 in 2007 and the first smartphone with a fingerprint scanner was the Motorola Atrix 4G in 2011.In September 2013, the iPhone 5S was unveiled as the first smartphone on a major U.S. carrier since the Atrix to feature the technology, which was called Touch ID.This feature proved popular with users and by 2017 all of Apple's major competitor's included a fingerprint scanner.