What makes a smartphone a "smart-phone"?

Phones that are more advanced are called smartphones. They have such ability like to browse the internet. These phones have come a long way through new technology from simple gadgets to the very advanced mini- computers.

The first of its kind was the IBM Simon designed in 1992and it was shown as a concept product at COMDEX (a trade show held in Nevada (las Vegas).

In 1993 it was released to the public and it was being sold by BellSouth. It had some other extra features besides being used as a phone; it had the world clock, calendar, games, note pad, address book, email client and it had the ability to receive and also send faxes. The users used to select telephone numbers using their fingers since it did not have any physical buttons. It had a unique on-screen "predictive" keyboard that was used to enter text. At that time it was a highly advanced phone but if compared to today's, it can be fairly low-end product that does not have the ability to download third party applications and still lacking a camera.

In 1996 the Nokia 9000 was released. This was a smartphone of distinctive palmtop computer style this was collaborative effort which was costly of a personal assistant by Hewlett-Packard combined with Nokias best selling phone at that time. It had a clamshell design, keyboard, user interface on the top of the phone, a feature of phone display, had a high resolution display and it had a PDA user interface under the door.

It was later followed by Nokia 9110 in 1998 and later 2000i in the year 2000. The first device labeled smartphone was used in 1997 by Ericsson for the phone GS88.

The touchscreen EricssonE380 was released. It used Symbian OS open operating system. It was using combined functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone. In was followed by P800 in 2002.

There was also the Nokia 9210 communicator that was introduced in 2000. It had a color screen, i.e. the first of its kind. It was later followed by 9500 communicator which had a smaller form and was very costly.

In 2007 the Nokia N95 was launched which had multimedia features. It had GPS, Wi-Fi connectivity, TV-out, LED flash and a 5 mega pixel camera that had auto focus.

In June 2007 the Nokia 6110 Navigator was introduced and is a Symbian based GPS phone.

The Nokia N8 smartphone was released in 2010 and it has a capacitive touchsreen. This was the first device to use the new Symbian 3 OS. It has a xenon flash that is capable of recording HD video in 720p. It has satellite navigation and it also has features like a front VGA camera that is for video conferencing. From 1996 to 2011, the Symbian was the number one smartphone platform to market share after it dropped behind Google Android OS. Symbian is to be replaced by windows operating system in all smartphones in future according to Nokia.