Smartphone

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Smartphone Mean?

A smartphone is a mobile phone with highly advanced features. A typical smartphone has a high-resolution touch screen display, WiFi connectivity, Web browsing capabilities, and the ability to accept sophisticated applications. The majority of these devices run on any of these popular mobile operating systems: Android, Symbian, iOS, BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile.

Advertisements

 

Techopedia Explains Smartphone

A smartphone is expected to have a more powerful CPU, more storage space, more RAM, greater connectivity options and larger screen than a regular cell phone.

High-end smartphones now run on processors with high processing speeds coupled with low power consumptions. That means, they’ll allow you to play 3D games, browse the Web, update your Facebook account, call, and text much longer than you used to.

In addition to the features mentioned earlier, smartphones are also equipped with innovative sensors like accelerometers or even gyrscopes. Accelerometers are responsible for displaying screens in portrait and landscape mode, while gyroscopes make it possible for games to support motion-based navigation.

The earliest touch screen smartphones used resistive touchscreen displays, which required the use of slender pointing objects known as styli (or stylus in singular form). Most of the later models however, like the iPhone and most Android phones, employ capacitive displays, which feature multi-touch finger gestures.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.