History of Computers - Smartphones

This page was created by Christian Segner

A smartphone is a high-end phone that is a combination of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone. Today's smartphones include media players, web browsers, cameras, as well as touchscreens. In addition, smartphones have built-in GPS navigation and can connect to Wi-Fi and mobile broadband access. ^[1]

Overview

The combination of a cellular telephone with built-in applications and internet access creates a mobile computer known as the smartphone. In 1994, IBM and BellSouth introduced the Simon Personal Communicator which is often called the first smartphone. The combination phone and PDA was extremely costly, and it was not until a decade later that smartphones were small enough for wide usage. In 2002, the Blackberry emerged as the popular corporate smartphone due to its focus on e-mail. However, in 2008, the iPhone 3G S and application platform greatly altered the history of smartphones. The iPhone, Blackberry, and Android took smartphones to an unprecedented level of computing. Now in 2015 we have the iPhone 6s, Samsung Notepad, and many other revolutionary smart phones that operate faster and had mobile helping systems such as Siri. ^[2]

The smartphone runs on its respective operating systems. For the past decade, the Symbian OS has been one of the most commonly and widely used operating systems for the smartphone. In 2010, the Symbian OS was embedded in over 330 million devices worldwide.^[3] More recently, the Apple iPhone OS has emerged as one of the easiest and most popular. The iPhone OS allows its user to multitask and zip between tasks with consistency unlike competing operating systems. Successful competitors include the Google Android and the Blackberry RIM.^[4] In the 2010s, the rise of iOS and Android has caused the fall of previous operating systems such as Symbian; in 2013, Nokia shipped the last handset running Symbian OS.^[5]

Significance

The smartphone is extremely significant in the history of computers because it compacts all of the essential features of a laptop or desktop computer into a reliable pocket-sized device. The luxury of being able to text, call, or use the internet quickly at any location in the world is helpful and important for everyday life. The smartphone is a symbol of how far computers as well as telephones have come along in the past 50 years. For example, the Cray-2 supercomputer – the world’s fastest supercomputer until 1990 – is over 40 times slower in calculations than the graphics unit of the iPhone 5S.^[6]