Characteristics of a SmartPhones

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This article is about smartphone characteristics. Take a note of six critical characterisitics listed below that majority of Smartphones possess.

With enhanced demand and rising competition, “Smartphones” have slowly turned a household name as a prime consumer electronics item but astoundingly, the proper definition of a ‘Smartphone’  is still blurred.

According to David Wood, EVP at Symbian Ltd, the company which is currently leading the Mobile OS market, “Smart phones differ from ordinary mobile phones in two fundamental ways: how they are built and what they can do.”

The main reason why smartphones are still identified distinctly and categorized easily is because of the unique characteristics that majority of Smartphones possess.

Take a note of six critical characterisitics listed below that majority of Smartphones possess, which will certainly help you differentiate between a Smartphone from an ordinary phone.

1. Mobile OS : If a Mobile phone is not running an Mobile Operating System, it is most probable to be an ordinary phone, not Smartphone. Look into the Handset specifications and you will realize if the handset has any Mobile Operating System running or not. The most popular Mobile Operating systems are :

• Symbian OS
• iPhone OS
• Windows Mobile OS
• RIM Blackberry
• Linux
• Palm OS
• Android

2. Open Source: The upcoming Mobile Operating systems are preferring to be Open source(for instance, Android). The major reason is the strength and possibilities that open source community brings in, which is almost impossible to manage, even if the manufacturer feeds huge investments into product research and development.

The De facto standard of Smartphones today, Apple iPhone is currently leading the way, majorly due to the hugely popular iPhone App Store, which is heavily populated with tens of thousands of useful applications, created by Third party developers(Open source community).

3. Web features: Smartphones are well known to provide a amazing internet experience, such as one-touch access to utility web services, easy e-mail access, e-book reader capabilities, built-in mobile web browser among others. As a thumb rule, one can say that if a mobile phone is meant to browse internet, it is most plausible to be a Smartphone.

4. Enhanced Hardware: External hardware features such as Wide & sensitive touchscreen, built-in keyboard, high resolution built-in camera, front side camera for video conferencing among others started evolving alongwith the arrival of Smartphones and today, most of the smartphones come with the above mentioned hardware features.

5. Mobile PC: Powerful processor, abundant memory storage and additional RAM are the basic requisites of a desktop PC or laptop but latest smartphones are coming up with all these mentioned hardware features as their basic capabilities. Such a trend may eventually fade away the distinction between Desktop Computers/Laptops and handheld smartphones.

6. Technology support: The telecom field has vastly grown from GSM/CDMA to GPRS, going upto 3G and even 4G(currently in planned phase) and parallely, the mobile hardware industry has also evolved itself to support the upcoming telecom standards.

It simply means that Smartphones must support the upcoming telecom standards such as 3G. In case, you find a mobile phone without 3G support today, there’s no point calling that handset a Smartphone.