Smartphone

A smartphone is a full-featured mobile phone with personal computer like functionality. They can be noted by several features which include, but are not limited to, touchscreen, operating system, and tethered modem capabilities on top of the default phone characteristics.

C Wikipedia

Some people think the basic feature of a smartphone C if it can be called smartphone C is email supporting. Also, a smartphone may have some other functionalities, for example camera, digital player and personal organizer. However, as the technology is developing fast, these features now can be found on many common phones. Today, most smartphone enable the enduser to install extra software to increase and improve the functionalities of the phone, while ordinary phones only support sandboxed applications. These applications may be developed by the manufacturer of the device, by the operator or by any other third-party software developer.

Now, more and more smartphone tend to have improved data processing capability. Enduser can use the phone to read and process documents such as PDF docs and MS Office docs. Internet accessing is also a trend in smartphone. Some smartphones have a miniature QWERTY keyboard, and some use a touch screen as input device. So some people consider smartphone as a mobile phone and a PDA in one device.

Operating System

There are several common operating systems (OS) used today in smartphones:

Symbian OS.

Linux operating system

Windows Mobile

RIM BlackBerry operating system

Palm OS.

And Apple used a version of its Mac OS X operating system for the new iPhone.