Smartphone are phones with advanced technology that goes well beyond basic phones capabilities. Smartphones or becoming closer with every new model to having the power of a home desktop computer that fits in your pocket. These phones have many different applications either built into the phone or you can download over the web. The Apple iPhone comes preloaded with various applications. Through Apple’s iTunes store you can download thousands of application built for productivity or just for entertainment.

Before smartphones there where only basic phones that let you make calls and had very basic applications. The Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) was essentially a smart phone without the capability of making phone calls. Over time and the progress of technology PDA’s added cell phone capabilities which emerged the smart phone.

Operating systems are an essential feature on smartphones. The most popular among operation systems is Symbian OS, built by Symbian Foundation. Symbian contains a user friendly interface, and a framework that utilizes common applications. Symbian OS can be found on Nokia’s product line of smartphones.

Another vastly popular operating system is Research in Motion (RIM). Rim is Symbian Foundation’s biggest competition and ran exclusively on the Blackberry smartphone.

You can’t leave the topic of smartphone operating systems without mentioning Apple’s iPhone OS. Currently 2 billion applications have been downloaded from the iTunes store onto the iPhone. The iPhone uses accelerometers which enable you to tilt the phone sideways to alter the screen presentation. Accelerometers are becoming more popular in smartphones.

The touch screen is a feature made popular by the iPhone which set a burst of a large line of competing touch screen phones. By finger gestures such as sliding, tapping, and pinching the screen, different features are cued.

Access to the web is available through smartphones too. Through the popular 3G network users can access the internet through higher speeds. Through technological advances we will be seeing a 4G network soon. The 4G network would provide consumers with much higher data transfer speed compared to the 3G.

Many phones such as the Apple iPhone utilize user’s home internet through Wi-Fi support. With the addition of a router in your home you can tap into the internet at faster speeds than the 3G network.

Smartphones also include a QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY keyboards are basically a mini version of a PC keyboard. Some phones use physical keyboards and others touch screen keyboards. Before the QWERTY keyboard users would have to continually push the same button in order to rotate through letters. For example, by pressing 1 multiple times you could access the, a, b, and c letter. The QWERTY keyboard was a necessary implementation for the boom of SMS texting.

Email access is another important feature of smartphones. Smartphones are able to sync your email account with your personal email. Smartphones are able to support multiple email accounts. Instant Messaging (IM) services, such as Yahoo! Messenger, and AOL’s AIM are also utilized on the majority of smartphones.

Apple’s iPhone enables you to view attachments sent via email, such as word documents. Through application downloads you can download these documents from your email and edit the text. Copy and paste is a new feature Apple as updated on the iPhone that enables the user to cut or copy text and paste the text into other applications.

The desire for producers is to make the device between the sender and receiver as invisible as possible. The goal is to be able to communicate with each other as effortless as possible. With the technology industry expanding every year, this target becomes more of a realization.

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