A smart phone is a full-featured mobile phone with personal computer like functionality. Most smart phones are camera phones that support full featured email capabilities with the functionality of a complete personal organizer. An important feature of most smart phones is that applications for enhanced data processing and connectivity can be installed on the device, by contrast to regular phones which support sandboxed applications. These applications may be developed by the manufacturer of the device, by the operator or by any other third-party software developer.
Smart phones should, however, not be confused with PDA-phones. They generally offer strong PDA-like features but are primarily still mobile phones. Data is entered either via a normal number pad or QWERTY keypad, though a handful of smart phones do offer touchscreen displays. Comparatively, smart phones also tend to be smaller in size than PDA-phones. On the other hand, PDA-phones offer full PDA functionalities and typically use touchscreen displays (as well as number and QWERTY keypads) for data entry. |
