11-01-2011, 01:37 PM
[attachment=8128]
INDRA.
NARAYAN.
CHAKRABORTY
INTRODUCTION
A smartphone is a mobile phone offering advanced capabilities, often with PC-like functionality (PC-mobile handset convergence). There is no industry standard definition of a smartphone. For some, a smartphone is a phone that runs complete operating system software providing a standardized interface and platform for application developers. For others, a smartphone is simply a phone with advanced features like e-mail, Internet and e-book reader capabilities, and/or a built-in full keyboard or external USB keyboard and VGA connector. In other words, it is a miniature computer that has phone capability.
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. Smartphones these days are powerful beasts. Their specification sheets almost read like what you’d find for a computer, and these devices are now capable of tasks that one would have done on a computer in the past, such as browsing desktop-class webpages, watching Flash videos, running multiple apps at once, grabbing email and even doing simple photo and video editing.
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. 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 product; however, its feature set at the time was incredibly advanced.
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 Personal digital assistant (PDA) by Hewlett Packard combined with Nokia's bestselling phone around that time and early prototype models had the two devices fixed via a hinge; the Nokia 9210 as the first color screen Communicator model which was the first true smartphone with an open operating system; the 9500 Communicator that was also Nokia's first cameraphone Communicator and Nokia's first WiFiphone; the 9300 Communicator was the third dimensional shift into a smaller form factor; and the latest E90 Communicator includesGPS. 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.
The Ericsson R380, released in 2000, was the first phone sold as a 'smartphone'. It was the world's first touch screen phone. The R380 had the usual PDA functions and the large touch screen was combined with an innovative flip so it could also be used as a normal phone.[11] It was the first commercially available Symbian OS phone, however it could not run native third-party applications. Although the Nokia 9210 was arguably the first true smartphone with an open operating system, Nokia continued to refer to it and the following models as Communicator; only Ericsson referred to its product as 'smartphone' at this time.
In early 2002 Handspring released the Palm OS Treo smartphone, utilizing a full keyboard that combined wireless web browsing, email, calendar and contact organizer, with mobile third-party applications that could be downloaded or synced with a computer.
In 2002 the new joint venture Sony Ericsson released the P800 smartphone, originally developed by Ericsson. It was based onSymbian OS and had full PDA functionality plus a range of features not commonly seen in mobile phones at that time: color touch screen, camera, polyphonic ring tones, email attachment viewers, video playback and an MP3 player with a standard 2.5 mmheadset jack. In 2002 RIM released the first BlackBerry which was the first smartphone optimized for wireless email use and has achieved a total customer base of 32 million subscribers by December 2009. Although the Nokia 7650, announced in 2001, was referred to as a 'smart phone' in the media, and is now called a 'smartphone' on the Nokia support site, the press release referred to it as an 'imaging phone'. Handspring delivered the first widely popular smartphone devices in the US market by marrying its Palm OS based Visor PDA together with a piggybacked GSM phone module, the VisorPhone. By 2002, Handspring was marketing an integrated smartphone called the Treo; the company subsequently merged with Palm primarily because the PDA market was dying but the Treo smartphone was quickly becoming popular as a phone with extended PDA organizer features. That same year, Microsoft announced its Windows CE Pocket PC OS would be offered as "Microsoft Windows Powered Smartphone 2002". Microsoft originally defined its Windows Smartphone products as lacking a touchscreen and offering a lower screen resolution compared to its sibling Pocket PC devices. Palm then introduced a few Windows Mobile smartphones alongside the existing Palm OS smartphones, and has now abandoned both platforms in favor of its new Palm webOS.
In 2005 Nokia launched its N-Series of 3G smartphones which Nokia started to market not as mobile phones but as multimedia computers. Out of 1 billion camera phones to be shipped in 2008, smartphones, the higher end of the market with full email support, will represent about 10% of the market or about 100 million units.
The Smartphone Summit semi-annual conference details smartphone industry market data, trends, and updates among smartphone related hardware, software, and accessories. Android, a cross platform OS for smartphones was released in 2008. Android is an Open Source platform backed by Google, along with major hardware and software developers (such as Intel, HTC, ARM, Motorola and eBay, to name a few), that form the Open Handset Alliance.
HARDWARE COMPONENTS
Smartphones these days are powerful beasts. Their specification sheets almost read like what you’d find for a computer, and these devices are now capable of tasks that one would have done on a computer in the past, such as browsing desktop-class webpages, watching Flash videos, running multiple apps at once, grabbing email and even doing simple photo and video editing. Since these mobile devices are able to accomplish so many tasks, the hardware specifications of a smartphone have gradually become a more important factor.
1. Processor : Processor speed is of somewhat less importance than the rest of the specifications, simply because these megahertz numbers are not capable of accurately reflecting the actual performance of a smartphone. More often than not, the everyday performance and speed of operation of a particular device are more dependent on software optimizations and the efficiency of the OS rather than purely based on processor speeds. At present, the ARM Cortex A8 is one of the most powerful mobile processors, being used in TI’s OMAP 3430 and Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms. For most of us, these names aren’t as important since the arguably most effective way of knowing a smartphone’s performance is by testing it in a store, but at the moment, devices like the iPhone 3GS, HTC Touch HD2 and Nokia N900 are three of the most powerful smartphones around. That said, most devices released in the past year do manage to offer plenty of performance that will satisfy all except the most demanding phone geeks; even a lowly Nokia 5800 which I’m using right now is already able to offer a decent amount of processing power, with the UI operating at a comfortable speed despite its average 434MHz ARM 11 processor that’s also present in the N97(mini).
2. Internal memory (also known as RAM) : This is an important figure to look at when selecting a new smartphone, especially for devices capable of multitasking out of the box (sorry iPhone) as having more RAM means being able to run more apps at one time without suffering from apps closing unexpectedly, system slowdowns and freezes. RAM size varies from 64MB to 128MB.
3. Display size, resolution and technology : Today’s devices come with a huge variety of displays with different sizes, resolution and utilize different technologies. Let’s get the obvious out of the way – the number of colours supported by a display doesn’t really matter because 65K-colour screens can look just as good as a 16 million-colour screen. Screen sizes typically range from 2.2-inches to 2.8 inches, with most screen resolutions being 240×320 pixels in either portrait or landscape. Most displays are based on TFT LCD technology with a transflective layer which uses a backlight to illuminate the pixels on the screen and has great visibility in direct sunlight. OLED screens are starting to be adopted in mobile devices. Touchscreen-operated smartphones typically have larger, higher-resolution displays than their non-touch counterparts.
4. Hardware 3D graphics acceleration : Having 3D graphics acceleration onboard results in better-looking games (those that take advantage of the added hardware) and smoother high-resolution video playback in addition to a overall-speedier user interface.
5. External Connectors : Standard external connectors refer to the use of non-proprietary connections for audio output and data transfers in a device. Most smartphones have a combination of 3.5mm standard headphone jack and micro USB port for audio and data respectively. At this point, micro USB charging is also starting to be implemented in newer devices.
6. Camera & LED/XENON FLASH : The same rules that govern megapixel counts on standalone digital cameras do apply to smartphones too; more megapixels isn’t always better. At the present moment, the two best camera-phones in the world are the Nokia N86 and Sony Ericsson Satio. One of the largest debates of all time with regards to smartphone imaging is whether Xenon or LED flash units should be used in smartphones . Xenon flash are always better than LED flash.
7. Battery : Battery has capability ranging from 850mAh to 1500mAh.
8. Internal sensors : Fundamentally, there are four internal sensors you should look out for; an accelerometer handles auto-rotation of your device’s display, detecting whether you’re trying to capture a photo in portrait or landscape mode, as well as for special features such as silencing calls and alarms when the device is turned over. A magnetometer is otherwise known as a digital compass; this is used in GPS navigation apps where the map is aligned to the direction you’re facing, as well as in “augmented reality” apps such as Layar on the Android platform; these apps make use of the digital compass in your device and your camera in order to point out certain points of interest relative to their actual location. A light sensor automatically adjusts your screen’s backlight and keypad lighting based on ambient lighting conditions; your screen would dim in dark conditions so as not to dazzle you and increase in brightness in sunlight to boost outdoor visibility. Lastly, a proximity sensor turns off the display during phone calls on touchscreen handsets so as to prevent accidental touches when the device is taped to the side of your face.
9. Wireless technologies : Fundamentally, at present, there are three types of wireless technologies in smartphones; cellular, Bluetooth and location services (GPS). Most devices released in the last year are what we call 3.5G devices; these are equipped with HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) and sometimes HSUPA (high-speed uplink packet access) which provide even faster data transfer rates than standard 3G, which is termed as UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system). EDGE and GPRS are 2.5G and 2G technologies respectively; all 3G phones continue to support these technologies in order to maintain connections when out of 3G coverage. Bluetooth has evolved over the years, with data transfer speeds and the reliability of wireless connections continuously increasing. The latest version that most devices released in the past year would come equipped with is known as Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR (enhanced data rate) which will probably provide speeds of up to 100kbps in most situations. AGPS is probably one of the most misunderstood technologies in recent times. AGPS stands for Assisted Global Positioning System, and it depends on a bunch of satellites in the sky in order to pinpoint your location in a navigation app when activated. For standard GPS systems, it might take quite a bit of time to get a fix on exactly where you are, especially in urban areas, but if your device has AGPS capability onboard, it is able to make use of cell tower data in order to narrow down your location, speeding up the process of acquiring a fix.
