Although for many, the era of smart mobile devices has long come, some still wonder: “Smartphone - what is it?” Indeed, a person who comes to the store to buy a mobile phone cannot always understand what kind of devices are on the windows: smartphones, familiar cell phones or compact personal computers (PDAs).
After all, that ephemeral facet that once separated one class of devices from another has almost disappeared, and manufacturers are gradually unifying their products. A vivid example is the mass products of Chinese industry that outwardly copy such models as, for example, Samsung Galaxy smartphones, but they differ significantly in characteristics and capabilities. To understand what is hiding under the definition of a smart phone, let's take a little mental journey into the past.
Cell mobile phone
The ability to talk from a distance using a telephone marked the beginning of a new era. Further improvement of the idea led to the emergence of a fairly compact wireless communication devices. Infrastructure has appeared and developed - the system of base stations and the corresponding network. It was then that mobile phones began to appear on sale. In fact, their functions were similar to wired brothers, but voice and data were transmitted using radio waves.
As a nice addition, manufacturers began to include in the device the ability to perform simple mathematical calculations (calculator) and view the days of the week (calendar).
Laptop computers
Without mentioning the PDA, you cannot answer the question "smartphone - what is it?" In parallel with mobile phones, another branch of compact devices — handheld computers — existed and developed. An enlarged screen, much more powerful computing units, some multimedia functions - this is the PDA. These devices are much closer to laptops than to mobile phones, although due to their size they are often compared with the latter. One of the differences was the presence in the PDA of an operating system that allows you to install appropriate programs that expand capabilities. Subsequently, GSM units were added to these devices, which endowed them with the capabilities of mobile phones. So there were "smart" (smart) phones.
For example, now you can buy smartphones from Samsung and some other companies that have a powerful
multi-core processor of the appropriate architecture; RAM, the volume of which is measured in gigabytes; advanced sound systems and touch display.
Smartphone - what is it?
As already mentioned, any such device must work under the control of one of the well-known operating systems. So, the presence of “on board” the OS Windows Mobile (or Phone), Linux, Android, iOS, Bada or BB OS, as well as a block for a SIM card automatically means that this unit is a smartphone. That is a kind of mini-computer with the capabilities of a mobile phone. Considering the question "smartphone - what is it", one cannot but recall the numerous models of cell phones in which you can install only applications written in Java. There are a lot of such solutions among Chinese copies of well-known smartphone models. These are precisely mobile phones, the functions of which are expanded. Although they have their own operating system, it is rigidly “tied to hardware” and is narrowly focused on a certain range of tasks.