Technology Electronics

Interested in learning the answer to the question "What is a Smarpthone"? Continue reading

A smartphone is a very useful and high-end mobile phone, which combines different functions, such as the ones of a personal computer and a traditional mobile phone. Most of today's smartphones incorporate a photo/video camera and a music player, so today's devices offer a great all-round experience to the user.
The internet is the main feature of a smartphone, but the high resolution touchscreens, last generation web browsers and hardware devices are also important parts of a good smartphone. There are also very few smartphones which can't access the internet through a Wi-Fi connection or are not able to function as a GPS.
There is no official delimitation between a smartphone and a normal phone, but the operating system might be the one that makes the difference. The most well-known operating systems are Apple iOS (for iPhone), Google Android (for most of the smartphone manufacturers), BlackBerry OS, Symbian (for Nokia devices) and Microsoft Windows Phone 7, which is quite new on the market.
Having a smartphone is today a very popular thing and the rate of smartphone adoption is accelerating very fast in the Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the US and other countries. This type of phones are very popular for teenagers and young adults (up to 35), but they tend to get more popular between a bit older audiences.
According to a study by comScore, around 50 million people in the United States own a smartphone, which means more than 1/5 of the population. However, as stated before, this number tends to increase very fast.
The most used operating system is Android, with 33% of the market in the last quarter of 2010, while the close follower seems to be Symbian, with 31%. However, Nokia's OS tends to decrease in sales, so it's expected to be soon overtaken by Apple, which half a year ago now had 16% of the market. RIM's BlackBerry OS followed close with 14% of the market.
Most of the smartphones are not quite useful without an internet connection, so this is why most of the phone companies (e.g. Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile, AT&T etc.) offer now monthly subscriptions with high broadband connection speed and unlimited usage, in some cases.

Since Apple released the Apple Store, the market for third-party applications became more and more popular. Any smartphone on the market comes with pre-set applications and with the possibility of downloading / buying many others. At a simple search in the Apple Store, each user can find thousands of applications from each field, from entertainment to work-related apps.
Smartphones are, as stated before, very popular and are part of the latest technology with tens of releases each month. While the numbers tend to say something else, the battle of the giants happens between Apple's iOS and Google's Android, which are currently the best and most popular operating systems on the market.


Leave a reply