Things that make smartphone smart

What is a Smartphone?

The name given to handheld devices which performs more tasks than a regular cell phone phone is smartphone. To be perfectly honest, the word smartphone is a bit misleading because it’s very hard to define where a cell phone stops being a cell phone and becomes a smartphone.

In 1973, Motorola revolutionized the business world with the introduction of a portable phone that could be used anywhere. Over a period of a decade the device slowly got smaller until you no longer needed to carry a briefcase around with you to make a call! In the 80′s a new kind of handheld device was gaining popularity called the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). This device helped you keep track of appointments, make notes and remind you of important dates.

IBM were the first company to realize that the cell phone and PDA functions could be combined in to one device and in 1992 at the Las Vegas Computer Trade Show they unveiled the first generation of smartphones. From one device you could not only manage your schedule but also call all your contacts to arrange meetings.

Fast forward to today and smartphones have changed beyond all recognition from the device IBM released in 1992. For starters, the processing power and memory that these phones have are more powerful than many desktop computers of just a decade ago.

Although we can’t definitely define what is and isn’t a smartphone, there are a number of features that can help decide. First and foremost, the smartphone should be able to do so much more than make phone calls and send and receive text messages. It should be a mobile office, a substitute for your computer.

In that sense you should be able to not just send and receive emails as you would in Gmail or Outlook, but also find the act of composing an email easy. This means that it should give you a full QWERTY keypad either as part of the phone or as a virtual keypad on the screen. Typing out long emails needs to be much easier than on a standard 0-9 keypad. While we’re on the topic of being able to easily bash out emails and read incoming mails, the screen size should be big enough to see a large chunk of what you are writing which means it needs to be several inches in size.

Connectivity is another important factor. We live in a high tech world and business revolves around computers and files. A smartphone should not just be able to read the latest Excel file, but send and receive it too. This means it needs WiFi capability to connect to the company Intranet, Bluetooth to connect to your laptop and your colleagues phones and maybe even a GPS so that your office knows your exact location at any given time.

One of the most popular operating systems for Smartphones is the Android OS. This takes productivity to a whole new level and turns your handheld device in to a virtual office. There is very little that you can do on your laptop that these latest smartphones can’t do. And that’s what makes it so smart!