Smartphones

A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone that combines the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone. Today's models typically also serve as portable media players and camera phones with high-resolution touchscreens, web browsers that can access and properly display standard web pages rather than only mobile-optimized sites, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi and mobile broadband access.

The term smartphone is usually used to describe phones with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone, although the distinction can be vague and there is no official definition for what constitutes the difference between them. The definitions also shift over time since many phones that are considered feature phones today can have capabilities that exceed those of phones that had been promoted as smartphones in the past.

Smartphones run mobile operating systems such as Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS, and embedded Linux distributions such as Maemo and MeeGo. Such systems can be installed on many different phone models, and typically each device can receive multiple OS software updates over its lifetime.

Smartphones run third-party applications using advanced application programming interfaces (APIs), which can allow those applications to have better integration with the phone's OS and hardware than is typical with feature phones. In comparison, feature phones more commonly run on proprietary firmware, with third-party software support through platforms such as Java ME or BREW.

from wikipedia