Smartphones

A smartphone is a mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a feature phone.[1][2][3] The first smartphones were devicesthat mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone or camera phone. Today's models also serve to combine the functions of portable media players,low-end compact digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and GPS navigation units. Modern smartphones typically also include high-resolution touchscreens, web browsers that can access andproperly display standard web pages rather than just mobile-optimized sites, and high-speed data access via Wi-Fi and mobile broadband.
The most common mobile operating systems (OS) used by modernsmartphones include Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone, Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS, and embedded Linux distributions such as Maemo and MeeGo. Such operatingsystems can be installed on many different phone models, and typically each device can receive multiple OS software updates over its lifetime.
The distinction between smartphones andfeature phones can be vague and there is no official definition for what constitutes the difference between them. One of the most significant differences is that the advanced applicationprogramming interfaces (APIs) on smartphones for running third-party applications[4] can allow those applications to have better integration with the phone's OS and hardware than is typical withfeature phones. In comparison, feature phones more commonly run on proprietary firmware, with third-party software support through platforms such as Java ME or BREW.[1] An additionalcomplication in distinguishing between smartphones and feature phones is that over time the capabilities of new models of feature phones can increase to exceed those of phones that had been promoted as