Posts Tagged touch screen phones

What is the Smartphone ?

Samsung-OmniaPRO-B7330-Windows-Mobile-6.5-SmartphoneSmartphone 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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How Smart is a Smartphone ?

The latest technology buzzword in mobile communications is the ’smartphone’. The days of a phone just making phone calls (and, if you were really lucky, take awful photos) are well and truly over. A demanding, tech-savvy public wants a phone that will provide them with a range of functions, including Internet access, the ability to send and receive emails and even to edit Word documents. The smartphone does all this – and more.

To really understand how important a development smartphones are, we first have to look at its heritage. The smartphone is a convergence of the traditional mobile or cell phone and personal digital assistants (PDAs) such as the Palm Pilot. Whereas a mobile phone was designed purely to make and receive calls, PDAs were used as portable, personal organisers. A PDA could store your contact information and a ‘to do’ list and link with your main PC. As technology moved on, PDAs developed the ability to receive and send emails. Mobile phones, in the meantime, gained a plethora of additional features such as messaging capabilities. The two technologies ran alongside for a while, each developing the same capabilities as the other, including wireless capability. Finally, someone had the bright idea of combining the two into one, portable package. The smartphone was born.

The key features of a smartphone all depend on the make or model you decide to purchase, but the bare minimum requirements to look for or consider when buying a smartphone are:

The Operating System

Generally, a smartphone will be based on an operating system that allows it to run productivity applications. For instance, the Blackberry runs its own operating system, while others run on Windows mobile. There are smartphones that run a scaled down version of Linux, but these are finding it a struggle to compete against the all-conquering Windows or Apple ‘Aps’ systems. If you’re looking for a smartphone, consider what operating systems your other technology is running if you want to successfully interface your smartphone with your laptop, for example.

Software

While almost all mobile phones include some sort of software, smartphones have taken it to a whole new level. A good smartphone will give you the ability to create and edit Microsoft Office documents, download applications such as personal finance managers, edit photos, access a GPS navigation system and create a playlist of digital tunes. The explosion of ‘aps’ (applications) for the most modern, touch screen phones are pushing software to the limit, with downloadable software applications available for almost anything you can name.

Web access

With a tech-smart public demanding 24/7 access to the Internet, no self-respecting smartphone would deny you web access. The most modern smartphones can access the Web at higher speeds, thanks to the development of 3G data networks and the addition of Wi-Fi support.

Qwerty keyboard

If you’re going to be sending emails from your phone, you really need a qwerty keyboard facility. These can be part of the hardware (like your computer keyboard but in miniature) or as on the new touch screen phones, part of the display screen.

Messaging

All mobile phones can send and receive text messages, but smartphones can go one better and receive email. Others can also include access to popular instant messaging sites such as MSN or Yahoo! Messenger.

It’s not just the technology that makes a smartphone smart. It’s the application of that technology into producing a mobile phone that does far more than just send and receive phone calls or take dreadful photos. The smartphone has been the death-knell of the palm pilot – why have two pieces of technology when you can combine it all into one, lightweight, easy to operate mobile consul?

Just don’t ever drop it onto a hard surface…

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