Smartphone News

A mobile smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a basic ‘feature phone. Growth in demand for advanced mobile devices boasting powerful processors, abundant memory, larger screens and open operating systems has outpaced the rest of the mobile phone market for several years.

The Nokia Communicator line was the first of Nokia’s Smartphone’s starting with the Nokia 9000, released in 1996. This distinctive palmtop computer style Smartphone was the result of a collaborative effort of an early successful and expensive Personal digital assistant by Hewlett Packard combined with Nokia’s bestselling phone around. The Nokia Communicator model is remarkable also having been the most expensive phone model sold by a major brand for almost the full lifespan of the model series, easily 20% and sometimes 40% more expensive than the next most expensive Smartphone by any major manufacturer.

Face book ranked second among Android Smartphone owners and Google Maps ranked second or third on all other platforms, making the two mobile applications the most used across all platforms. Despite the dominance of Face book and Google Maps, gaming was far and away the most popular mobile app category with 65 percent of smart phone owners having downloaded a game.

The first phone to use the Android OS was the HTC Dream, branded for distribution by T-Mobile. The phone features a full, capacitive touch screen, a flip out keyboard, and a track ball for navigating web pages. The software suite included on the phone consists of integration with Google’s proprietary applications, such as Maps, Calendar, and Gmail, as well as Google’s Chrome Light full HTML web browser.

In July 2008 Apple introduced its App Store with both free and paid applications. The app store can deliver Smartphone applications developed by third parties directly to the iPhone or iPod Touch over wi-fi or cellular network without using a PC to download. The App Store has been a huge success for Apple.

Symbian is perhaps the least known among U.S. consumers, yet it is Europe’s most popular smart-phone OS. It comes in various flavors, but all the Symbian phones we tested use the Series 60 version. Symbian uses much less memory and battery power than Windows Smartphone, the other major phone-only OS represented in this roundup.

As of March 2010, Nokia’s leading smart phone is the N900. The N900 includes an 800×480 pixel touch screen, supports full multi-tasking has a 5Mpixel camera capable of full frame rate high resolution video, and comes with a wide range of modern smart phone features including GPS, multiple network access and has 32GB on-board memory.

The open source culture has penetrated the smart phone market in a way. There have been attempts to open source both hardware and software of a smart phone. Most notable project from open hardware development is most likely the Neo Free Runner smart phone developed by Openmoko. Lately, the Google Android OS is a popular open source mobile operating system. Nokia has an initiative around Symbian too, which has open-sourced all Symbian smart phone code in February 2010.

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