smartphone

A cellular telephone with information access. It provides digital voice service as well as any combination of e-mail, text messaging, pager, Web access, voice recognition, still and/or video camera, MP3, TV or video player and organizer (see PDA).

Introduced in 1994 by IBM and BellSouth, the Simon Personal Communicator was a combination phone and PDA. Often mentioned as the first smartphone, the Simon was costly and heavy (see personal communicator). It took another decade before smartphones became widely used, and Apple's iPhone caused a frenzy when it came out in 2007 (see iPhone).

Smartphone Operating Systems
The major smartphone environments are Symbian, Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile. Microsoft branded the term "Smartphone" (capital S) within its Windows Mobile platform, and the iPhone uses a version of the Mac OS X operating system. See Pocket PC, BlackBerry, iPhone, smartphone virus, WAP, photo messaging and Internet appliance.

Smartphone

This Treo was one of the first smartphones. Introduced in 2002, it used the Palm OS for organizer applications and offered e-mail, Web browsing and cellular phone service. (Image courtesy of Palm, Inc.)

Apple's iPhone

No telephone ever caused as much buzz as Apple's iPhone. Introduced in the summer of 2007, people camped out overnight to be among the first to own one. Packing a lot of functions in a 2.4x4.5" case that is only .46" thick, the iPhone has only one physical button, which displays the main menu shown here. (Image courtesy of Apple Inc.)