Smartphones are the new breed of mobile phones with fully featured media players, digital photo and video cameras, third-generation high-speed mobile Internet access, GPS, e-mail, text messaging, and even mobile television. And it seems like you can’t throw a rock these days without hitting a newly released smartphone with features that would have been unheard of just a few years ago.
Of course, the most well-known smartphone of the past year is the Apple iPhone, but it is increasingly facing stiff competition from competitors, including Blackberry, HTP, Nokia and others. And while the iPhone set the standard for a fully featured smartphone, there is a new breed of devices emerging that raise the bar even higher.
The new mega-smartphones feature high-end components, including near pro quality digital cameras, media players with 20 or even 40 GB of memory, and fully functional web browsers that take advantage of high-speed mobile Internet access and WiFi. In other words, the new breed is faster, more versatile, and provide greater computing power than even laptops could boast six or seven years ago.
So where is all of this progress leading? Many experts see a trend toward “all in one” mobile communication devices continuing to shrink in size, while increasing in power and versatility to the point where we will seldom need to use our home or laptop computers. Of course, this eventuality is still a long way off right now, but the recent influx of “all singing, all dancing” mobile smartphones is certainly pointing in that direction.
In fact, even the phrase “smartphone” is getting to the point where it doesn’t do justice to these devices. Consider the Nokia N95, for example, which features a built-in high spec’d 5 megapixel digital camera with autofocusing Carl Zeiss lens and white-balancing. Yes, it’s a phone with a high-end camera, but you could just as easily call it a camera that happens to include a phone. The lines are becoming increasingly blurred between mobile phone, video camera, MP3 player, GPS device, and laptop computer.
The Blackberry Curve is another good example. The Curve features a fully functional GPS navigator with TeleNav maps and voice directions. It’s also got a QVGA display, a high-end MP3 player, and a two megapixel camera with built-in LED flash. And of course, it also happens to have a phone.
More and more, our phones are becoming something other than phones; and as we grow to rely on handheld devices for a wide variety of tasks from video, pictures, music, web browsing, GPS and others, the industry competition becomes more “cutthroat” to add everything but the kitchen sink into the humble cell phone.
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