or other uses, see Smartphone (disambiguation).

A smartphone (often simply called a phone) is a mobile device that combines the
functionality of a traditional mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically
has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and
services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multimedia playback
and streaming. Smartphones have built-in cameras, GPS navigation, and support for various
communication methods, including voice calls, text messaging, and internet-based messaging
apps.

A smartphone displaying the homepage of the English

Wikipedia

Smartphones are distinguished from older-design feature phones by their more advanced
hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, access to the internet, business
applications, mobile payments, and multimedia functionality, including music,
video, gaming, radio, and television.

Smartphones typically contain a number of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated

circuit (IC) chips, include various sensors that can be leveraged by pre-installed and third-
party software (such as a magnetometer, a proximity sensor, a barometer, a gyroscope,
an accelerometer, and more), and support diverse wireless communication protocols (such
as LTE, 5G NR, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and satellite navigation). In the mid-2020s, smartphone
manufacturers have begun to integrate satellite messaging connectivity and satellite
emergency services into devices for use in remote regions where there is no reliable cellular
network.

Following the rising popularity of the iPhone in the late 2000s, the majority of smartphones
have featured thin, slate-like form factors with large, capacitive touch screens with support
for multi-touch gestures rather than physical keyboards. Most modern smartphones have the
ability for users to download or purchase additional applications from a centralized app store.
They often have support for cloud storage and cloud synchronization, and virtual assistants.

Smartphones have largely replaced personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, handheld/palm-
sized PCs, portable media players (PMP),, point-and-shoot cameras, camcorders, and, to a
lesser extent, handheld video game consoles, e-reader devices, pocket calculators, and GPS
tracking units.

Since the early 2010s, improved hardware and faster wireless communication (due to
standards such as LTE and 5G NR) have bolstered the growth of the smartphone industry. As
of 2014, over a billion smartphones are sold globally every year. In 2019 alone, 1.54 billion
smartphone units were shipped worldwide. 75.05 percent of the world population were
smartphone users as of 2020.
Contents

1 History

o 1.1 Forerunner

o 1.2 PDA/phone hybrids

o 1.3 Japanese cell phones

o 1.4 Early smartphones

o 1.5 Form factor and operating system shifts

 1.5.1 Operating system competition

o 1.6 Camera advancements

 1.6.1 Video resolution

 1.6.2 Slow motion video

 1.6.3 HDR video

 1.6.4 Audio recording

 1.6.5 Front cameras

o 1.7 Display advancements

 1.7.1 Multi-tasking

o 1.8 Foldable smartphones

o 1.9 Other developments in the 2010s

o 1.10 Other developments in the 2020s

2 Hardware

o 2.1 Central processing unit

o 2.2 Buttons

o 2.3 Display

 2.3.1 Screen sizes

 2.3.2 Panel types

 2.3.3 Alternative input methods

 2.3.4 Notification light

 o 2.4 Sensors

 2.4.1 Common sensors

 2.4.2 Rare sensors

o 2.5 Storage

 2.5.1 Memory cards

 2.5.2 File transfer

o 2.6 Sound

 2.6.1 Audio connector

o 2.7 Battery

 2.7.1 Charging

 2.7.2 Power management

o 2.8 Cameras

 2.8.1 Space constraints

 2.8.2 Dedicated camera button

o 2.9 Back cover materials

o 2.10 Accessories

3 Software

o 3.1 Mobile operating systems

o 3.2 Mobile app

o 3.3 Application stores

4 List of current smartphone brands

5 Sales

o 5.1 By manufacturer

o 5.2 By operating system

6 Use

o 6.1 Contemporary use and convergence

o 6.2 Mobile banking and payment

 o 6.3 Facsimile

7 Criticism and issues

o 7.1 Social impacts

o 7.2 While driving

o 7.3 Legal

o 7.4 Medical

o 7.5 Impacts on cognition and mental health

o 7.6 Security

o 7.7 Sleep

8 Replacement of dedicated digital cameras

9 Lifespan

 10 See also

 11 Notes

 12 References

 13 External links

History

See also: Mobile operating system § Timeline

Early smartphones were marketed primarily towards the enterprise market, attempting to
bridge the functionality of standalone PDA devices with support for cellular telephony, but
were limited by their bulky form, short battery life, slow analog cellular networks, and the
immaturity of wireless data services. These issues were eventually resolved with
the exponential scaling and miniaturization of MOS transistors down to sub-micron
levels (Moore's law), the improved lithium-ion battery, faster digital mobile data
networks (Edholm's law), and more mature software platforms that allowed mobile
device ecosystems to develop independently of data providers.

In the 2000s, NTT DoCoMo's i-mode platform, BlackBerry, Nokia's Symbian platform,
and Windows Mobile began to gain market traction, with models often
featuring QWERTY keyboards or resistive touchscreen input and emphasizing access to push
email and wireless internet.

Forerunner

Main article: IBM Simon

 IBM Simon and charging base (1994)

In the early 1990s, IBM engineer Frank Canova realised that chip-and-wireless technology
was becoming small enough to use in handheld devices. The first commercially available
device that could be properly referred to as a "smartphone" began as a prototype called
"Angler" developed by Canova in 1992 while at IBM and demonstrated in November of that
year at the COMDEX computer industry trade show. A refined version was marketed to
consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator. In addition
to placing and receiving cellular calls, the touchscreen-equipped Simon could send and
receive faxes and emails. It included an address book, calendar, appointment scheduler,
calculator, world time clock, and notepad, as well as other visionary mobile applications such
as maps, stock reports and news.

The IBM Simon was manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric, which integrated features with its
own cellular radio technologies. It featured a liquid-crystal display (LCD) and PC
Card support. The Simon was commercially unsuccessful, particularly due to its bulky form
factor and limited battery life, using NiCad batteries rather than the nickel–metal hydride
batteries commonly used in mobile phones in the 1990s, or lithium-ion batteries used in
modern smartphones.

The term "smart phone" was not coined until a year after the introduction of the Simon,
appearing in print as early as 1995, describing AT&T's PhoneWriter Communicator. [non-primary source

The term "smartphone" was first used by Ericsson in 1997 to describe a new device
needed]

concept, the GS88.

PDA/phone hybrids

Main article: Personal digital assistant

Beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s, many people who had mobile phones carried a separate
dedicated PDA device, running early versions of operating systems such as Palm OS, Newton
OS, Symbian or Windows CE/Pocket PC. These operating systems would later evolve into
early mobile operating systems. Most of the "smartphones" in this era were hybrid devices
that combined these existing familiar PDA OSes with basic phone hardware. The results were
devices that were bulkier than either dedicated mobile phones or PDAs, but allowed a limited
amount of cellular Internet access. PDA and mobile phone manufacturers competed in
reducing the size of devices. The bulk of these smartphones combined with their high cost
and expensive data plans, plus other drawbacks such as expansion limitations and decreased
battery life compared to separate standalone devices, generally limited their popularity to
"early adopters" and business users who needed portable connectivity.

In March 1996, Hewlett-Packard released the OmniGo 700LX, a modified HP

200LX palmtop PC with a Nokia 2110 mobile phone piggybacked onto it and ROM-based
software to support it. It had a 640 × 200 resolution CGA compatible four-shade gray-scale
LCD screen and could be used to place and receive calls, and to create and receive text
messages, emails and faxes. It was also 100% DOS 5.0 compatible, allowing it to run
thousands of existing software titles, including early versions of Windows.
The Nokia 9110 Communicator, opened for access to keyboard
In August 1996, Nokia released the Nokia 9000 Communicator, a digital cellular PDA based
on the Nokia 2110 with an integrated system based on the PEN/GEOS 3.0 operating system
from Geoworks. The two components were attached by a hinge in what became known as
a clamshell design, with the display above and a physical QWERTY keyboard below. The
PDA provided e-mail; calendar, address book, calculator and notebook applications; text-
based Web browsing; and could send and receive faxes. When closed, the device could be
used as a digital cellular telephone.

In June 1999 Qualcomm released the "pdQ Smartphone", a CDMA digital PCS smartphone
with an integrated Palm PDA and Internet connectivity.

Subsequent landmark devices included:

 The Ericsson R380 (December 2000) by Ericsson Mobile Communications, the first
phone running the operating system later named Symbian (it ran EPOC Release 5,
which was renamed Symbian OS at Release 6). It had PDA functionality and
limited Web browsing on a resistive touchscreen utilizing a stylus. While it was
marketed as a "smartphone", users could not install their own software on the
device.

 TheKyocera 6035 (February 2001), a dual-nature device with a separate Palm

OS PDA operating system and CDMA mobile phone firmware. It supported limited
Web browsing with the PDA software treating the phone hardware as an attached
modem.

 The Nokia 9210 Communicator (June 2001), the first phone running Symbian
(Release 6) with Nokia's Series 80 platform (v1.0). This was the first Symbian
phone platform allowing the installation of additional applications. Like the Nokia
9000 Communicator, it is a large clamshell device with a full physical QWERTY
keyboard inside.

 Handspring's Treo 180 (2002), the first smartphone that fully integrated the Palm
OS on a GSM mobile phone having telephony, SMS messaging and Internet access
built into the OS. The 180 model had a thumb-type keyboard and the 180g version
had a Graffiti handwriting recognition area, instead.

Japanese cell phones

Main articles: Japanese mobile phone culture and Mobile phone industry in Japan

In 1999, Japanese wireless provider NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode, a new mobile
internet platform which provided data transmission speeds up to 9.6 kilobits per second, and
access web services available through the platform such as online shopping. NTT DoCoMo's
i-mode used cHTML, a language which restricted some aspects of traditional HTML in favor
of increasing data speed for the devices. Limited functionality, small screens and limited
bandwidth allowed for phones to use the slower data speeds available. The rise of i-mode
helped NTT DoCoMo accumulate an estimated 40 million subscribers by the end of 2001,
and ranked first in market capitalization in Japan and second globally. Japanese cell phones
increasingly diverged from global standards and trends to offer other forms of advanced
services and smartphone-like functionality that were specifically tailored to the Japanese
market, such as mobile payments and shopping, near-field communication (NFC)
allowing mobile wallet functionality to replace smart cards for transit fares, loyalty cards,
identity cards, event tickets, coupons, money transfer, etc., downloadable content like
musical ringtones, games, and comics, and 1seg mobile television. Phones built by Japanese
manufacturers used custom firmware, however, and did not yet feature standardized mobile
operating systems designed to cater to third-party application development, so their software
and ecosystems were akin to very advanced feature phones. As with other feature phones,
additional software and services required partnerships and deals with providers.

The degree of integration between phones and carriers, unique phone features, non-
standardized platforms, and tailoring to Japanese culture made it difficult for Japanese
manufacturers to export their phones, especially when demand was so high in Japan that the
companies did not feel the need to look elsewhere for additional profits.

The rise of 3G technology in other markets and non-Japanese phones with powerful
standardized smartphone operating systems, app stores, and advanced wireless network
capabilities allowed non-Japanese phone manufacturers to finally break in to the Japanese
market, gradually adopting Japanese phone features like emojis, mobile payments, NFC, etc.
and spreading them to the rest of the world.

Early smartphones

Several BlackBerry smartphones, which were highly popular in the mid-late 2000s

Phones that made effective use of any significant data connectivity were still rare outside
Japan until the introduction of the Danger Hiptop in 2002, which saw moderate success
among U.S. consumers as the T-Mobile Sidekick. Later, in the mid-2000s, business users in
the U.S. started to adopt devices based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and
then BlackBerry smartphones from Research In Motion. American users popularized the term
"CrackBerry" in 2006 due to the BlackBerry's addictive nature. In the U.S., the high cost of
data plans and relative rarity of devices with Wi-Fi capabilities that could avoid cellular data
network usage kept adoption of smartphones mainly to business professionals and "early
adopters."

Outside the U.S. and Japan, Nokia was seeing success with its smartphones based
on Symbian, originally developed by Psion for their personal organisers, and it was the most
popular smartphone OS in Europe during the middle to late 2000s. Initially, Nokia's Symbian
smartphones were focused on business with the Eseries, similar to Windows Mobile and
BlackBerry devices at the time. From 2002 onwards, Nokia started producing consumer-
focused smartphones, popularized by the entertainment-focused Nseries. Until 2010,
Symbian was the world's most widely used smartphone operating system.

The touchscreen personal digital assistant (PDA)–derived nature of adapted operating

systems like Palm OS, the "Pocket PC" versions of what was later Windows Mobile, and
the UIQ interface that was originally designed for pen-based PDAs on Symbian OS devices
resulted in some early smartphones having stylus-based interfaces. These allowed for virtual
keyboards and handwriting input, thus also allowing easy entry of Asian characters.

By the mid-2000s, the majority of smartphones had a physical QWERTY keyboard. Most
used a "keyboard bar" form factor, like the BlackBerry line, Windows
Mobile smartphones, Palm Treos, and some of the Nokia Eseries. A few hid their full
physical QWERTY keyboard in a sliding form factor, like the Danger Hiptop line. Some
even had only a numeric keypad using T9 text input, like the Nokia Nseries and other models
in the Nokia Eseries. Resistive touchscreens with stylus-based interfaces could still be found
on a few smartphones, like the Palm Treos, which had dropped their handwriting input after a
few early models that were available in versions with Graffiti instead of a keyboard.

Form factor and operating system shifts

The LG Prada with a large capacitive touchscreen introduced in 2006 The original Apple
iPhone; following its introduction the common smartphone form factor shifted to large
touchscreen software interfaces without physical keypads

The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a shift in smartphone interfaces away from devices with
physical keyboards and keypads to ones with large finger-
operated capacitive touchscreens. The first phone of any kind with a large capacitive
touchscreen was the LG Prada, announced by LG in December 2006. This was a
fashionable feature phone created in collaboration with Italian luxury designer Prada with a
3" 240 x 400 pixel screen, a 2-Megapixel digital camera with 144p video recording ability, an
LED flash, and a miniature mirror for self portraits.

In January 2007, Apple Computer introduced the iPhone. It had a 3.5" capacitive touchscreen
with twice the common resolution of most smartphone screens at the time, and
introduced multi-touch to phones, which allowed gestures such as "pinching" to zoom in or
out on photos, maps, and web pages. The iPhone was notable as being the first device of its
kind targeted at the mass market to abandon the use of a stylus, keyboard, or keypad typical
of contemporary smartphones, instead using a large touchscreen for direct finger input as its
main means of interaction.

The iPhone's operating system was also a shift away from older operating systems (which
older phones supported and which were adapted from PDAs and feature phones) to an
operative system powerful enough to not require using a limited, stripped down web
browser that can only render pages specially formatted using technologies such
as WML, cHTML, or XHTML and instead ran a version of Apple's Safari browser that could
easily render full websites not specifically designed for phones.

Later Apple shipped a software update that gave the iPhone a built-in on-device App Store
allowing direct wireless downloads of third-party software. This kind of centralized App
Store and free developer tools quickly became the new main paradigm for all smartphone
platforms for software development, distribution, discovery, installation, and payment, in
place of expensive developer tools that required official approval to use and a dependence
on third-party sources providing applications for multiple platforms.

The advantages of a design with software powerful enough to support advanced applications
and a large capacitive touchscreen affected the development of another smartphone OS
platform, Android, with a more BlackBerry-like prototype device scrapped in favor of a
touchscreen device with a slide-out physical keyboard, as Google's engineers thought at the
time that a touchscreen could not completely replace a physical keyboard and
buttons. Android is based around a modified Linux kernel, again providing more power
than mobile operating systems adapted from PDAs and feature phones. The first Android
device, the horizontal-sliding HTC Dream, was released in September 2008.

In 2012, Asus started experimenting with a convertible docking system named PadFone,
where the standalone handset can when necessary be inserted into a tablet-sized screen unit
with integrated supportive battery and used as such.

In 2013 and 2014, Samsung experimented with the hybrid combination of compact
camera and smartphone, releasing the Galaxy S4 Zoom and K Zoom, each equipped with
integrated 10× optical zoom lens and manual parameter settings (including manual exposure
and focus) years before these were widely adapted among smartphones. The S4 Zoom
additionally has a rotary knob ring around the lens and a tripod mount.

While screen sizes have increased, manufacturers have attempted to make smartphones
thinner at the expense of utility and sturdiness, since a thinner frame is more vulnerable to
bending and has less space for components, namely battery capacity.