HOW THE CELLPHONE GOT SMART

Human intelligence has a long and distinguished history. From Greek philosophers to
geek programmers, being called a "smart" person is always beneficial.

With such high inherent value placed on intelligence, giving telecommunications

devices with the personified moniker "smartphones" means those devices better be
pretty revolutionary — and they are!

After being introduced in the late 1990s, smartphones have come to define the way
individual people connect to the rest of the world. The top five manufacturers shipped
nearly half a billion devices around the world in 2011 alone. About half of the mobile
phones used in the U.S. are "smart," and that percentage is growing rapidly,

Smartphones have come a long way in a short time. Improvements in technical

specifications such as internal processors, battery life, storage capability, screen size
and broadband connectivity optimize the way devices perform.

While the future for smartphones looks promising, let's take a look at how we got to this
point in time.

The History of Smartphones

 1946: AT&T Establishes the First Mobile Network

Without a wireless network, there would not be wireless phones. Long before the
Verizon guys were traveling the globe asking "Can you hear me now?" the American
Telephone and Telegraph Company set up the first wireless network. On June 17,
1946, a truck driver placed the first wireless telephone call.

 1974: Theodore George Paraskevakos Patents the Basic Smartphone Concept

Years ahead of his time, Paraskevakos filed the paperwork to the U.S. Patent Office in
1972 for an "apparatus for generating and transmitting digital information."
Paraskevakos was born in Athens, Greece, but became a citizen of the U.S. His
company, based in Delaware, was ultimately granted the patent in May 1974.

 1994: IBM Combines a Cellphone and PDA Forming the Simon

Personal Communicator

This ancestor of the modern smartphone was capable of text

messaging, faxing and emailing, in addition to making phone calls. The
device retailed for $1,099 or $899 if the buyer signed up for a two-year
service contract (some things never change).
  1999: The Smartphone Market Begins to Bear
Fruit With the BlackBerry Email Device

At $399, the initial BlackBerry device was certainly more

affordable than the Simon Personal Communicator. The
only problem was the first BlackBerry was only a two-way
pager with email capabilities, not a phone. It wasn't until
2003 that a BlackBerry smartphone hit the market.

 2000: Ericsson Uses the Magic Word When Marketing Its R380

Give Ericsson credit for marketing ability. The Swedish company called its R380 mobile
phone a "smartphone," a term that has certainly caught on in the marketplace. The
device was a lightweight flip phone that ran the Symbian operating system. Symbian
was the dominant smartphone operating system until Android surpassed it in 2011.

 2007: Apple's Multi-Touch Screen iPhone Brings Smartphone Design to New

Heights

It was similar to an iPod, except you could use it to make phone calls, take pictures and
browse the Internet. Apple was not exactly a pioneering smartphone company. The
iPhone was released years after the first smartphone, and despite Apple's claim, it
wasn't the first company to have a multi-touch screen. By combining the features,
however, Apple created a smartphone that offered more than just a way to
communicate with other people. The iPhone was literally a mobile media center.
Updated versions of the iPhone have become progressively more sophisticated, and
fanfare for the product seems to increase with each release. Apple introduced the most
recent incarnation of the device, the iPhone 5, at a ballyhooed press event on Sept. 12.

 2008: Google Blows Up the Smartphone Market With Its Android Operating
System

Android phones hit the market in October 2008, and it quickly

became the dominant mobile operating system. There were more
Android devices sold than Apple and Symbian combined in 2010.
Although Android and Apple's iOS are rivals, there is not actually
one "Android phone," but rather a multitude of models across
several companies that make Android-based phones. Today,
there are more than 500 million active Android devices, which is
about one for every 14 people on the planet. Hopefully they're not
all as paranoid as this little guy:
  2010: The Smartphone Market Catches a Virus

Smartphones have become so integrated that people are pushing all kinds of highly
personal information through the devices, such as email passwords and bank account
information. This is exactly the type of information cyber criminals want to steal. Not to
mention, with people freely and frequently installing third-party software onto their
smartphones, there is significant potential for security problems. Kaspersky Lab, a
mobile-security software developer, identified what it said was the first Trojan virus for
Android devices in 2010. Keeping your phone's operating system up to date should
help protect against these mobile monsters.

 The Future of Smartphones

Security concerns aside, the ability to support third-party software will be the driving
force behind smartphone performance going forward. Third-party software refers to the
features we refer to as "apps."

With apps, smartphones' capabilities

are not limited to the ideas of the
programmers at the companies that
manufacture the hardware — such as
Apple or Samsung. Anyone with an
idea can create a smartphone app.
Many of these simple yet subtly life-
changing apps, such as Instagram and
Shazam, have even been incorporated
into our everyday language and used
as verbs, just like Google.

In its four-year existence, the Apple App Store already boasts 700,000 mobile apps
with downloads totaling more than 25 billion. Google Play hosts 600,000 apps and
sees 1.5 billion app downloads every month.

With motivated startups driving the mobile app development industry, the only
restriction on smartphone capabilities is the limit of human imagination and, of course,
current hardware. In other words, if there isn't yet "an app for that," there probably will
be one soon.