Monday, January 19, 2009

What is a Smartphone - A brief history.

Smartphone is a mobile fun which have the functionality of more than an ordinary phone – more like a personal computer. A smart phone  can be considered as a bridge between a laptop and a mobile phone.

There is no standard definition for a Smartphone. People have different perspective about Smart phone. Some people like to see a smartphone as  miniature version of laptop ( more tech savvy) and some like to see it as an advanced version of a mobile phone ( less tech savvy).  For the time being lets define a Smart phone as  “ A miniature computer that have phone functionality”. In this blog we will try to explore a smart phone in this perspective – More like a miniature computer rather than an advanced mobile phone.

According to David Wood, EVP at Symbian, "Smartphone differ from ordinary mobile phones in two fundamental ways: how they are built and what they can do”

History

The first smartphone was called Simon; it was designed by IBM in 1992 and shown as a concept product that year at COMDEX, the computer industry trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was released to the public in 1993 and sold by BellSouth. Besides being a mobile phone, it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, send and receive fax, and games. simon

It had no physical buttons to dial with. Instead customers used a touch-screen to select phone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with a unique on-screen "predictive" keyboard. By today's standards, the Simon would be a fairly low-end smartphone.The Nokia Communicator line was the first of Nokia's smartphones 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 PDA model by Hewlett Packard combined with Nokia's bestselling phone around that time and early prototype models had the two devices fixed via a hinge

Details of all initial smart phones will be posted in the coming posts.