smartphone
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- Also spelled:
- smart phone
smartphone,mobile telephone with a display screen (typically aliquid crystal display, or LCD), built-in personal information management programs (such as an electronic calendar and address book)), and anoperating system (OS) that allows other computersoftware to be installed for Web browsing, email, music, video, and other applications. A smartphone may be thought of as ahandheld computerintegrated within a mobile telephone.
The first smartphone was designed byIBM and sold by BellSouth (formerly part of theAT&T Corporation) in 1993. It included a touchscreen interface for accessing its calendar, address book, calculator, and other functions. As the market matured and solid-statecomputer memory andintegrated circuits became less expensive over the following decade, smartphones became more computer-like, and more advanced services, such asInternet access, became possible. Advanced services becameubiquitous with the introduction of the so-calledthird-generation (3G)mobile phone networks in 2001. Before 3G, most mobile phones could send and receive data at a rate sufficient fortelephone calls and text messages. Using 3G,communication takes place at bit-rates high enough for sending and receiving photographs, video clips, music files, e-mails, and more. Most smartphone manufacturers license an operating system, such asMicrosoft Corporation’s Windows Mobile OS, Symbian OS,Google’sAndroid OS, orPalm OS. Research in Motion’sBlackBerry andApple Inc.’siPhone have their ownproprietary systems.
Smartphones contain either a keyboard integrated with the telephone number pad or a standard “QWERTY” keyboard fortext messaging,e-mailing, and using Webbrowsers. “Virtual” keyboards can be integrated into a touch-screen design. Smartphones often have a built-in camera for recording and transmitting photographs and short videos. In addition, many smartphones can accessWi-Fi “hot spots” so that users can accessVoIP (voice over Internet protocol) rather than pay cellular telephone transmission fees. The growing capabilities of handheld devices and transmissionprotocols have enabled a growing number of inventive and fanciful applications—for instance, “augmented reality,” in which a smartphone’s global positioning system (GPS) locationchip can be used to overlay the phone’s camera view of a street scene with local tidbits of information, such as the identity of stores, points of interest, or real estate listings.
