Computer Phone: Smartphones and PDA Phones
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In our first article, we mentioned that smartphones are devices that have a valid claim to the abstract term "computer phone". While it is often perceived as a mobile phone with top-of-the-line "smart" capabilities, a smartphone can also be a handheld computer (such as a personal digital assistant, or PDA) with added telephone capabilities.
What's confusing for consumers is that PDAs with telephone functions are sometimes called "PDA phones", and are treated differently from smartphones. In fact, Wikipedia states that "[the PDA phone] differs from a smartphone in that it has a touch screen and a stylus. Compared with a smartphone it usually has a larger screen, a more powerful microprocessor, more memory, etc." But for all purposes, smartphones and PDA phones – whether you agree with their definitions or not – can be both treated as "computer phones".
A hallmark of a smartphone (here, we extend this term to PDA phones) is that you can install additional applications on it, thus widening the range of its capabilities. A smartphone’s features include, but are not limited to, phonebooks, video and phone cameras, calendars, Web browsers (e.g. Opera), calculators, games, and GPS navigation programs. Some smartphones can also read business documents such as Microsoft Word and Excel files.
Several of the popular smartphone lines in the market are the Nokia Series 60 (with the Nokia 7710 being the first multimedia smartphone from the company), Palm Treo, and BlackBerry.
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