How Smartphones Work

that's true. There were quite a few, and I couldn't help. But first of all, gaze at them longingly. And second of all, uh, you know what, there's a funny thing about getting a bunch of journalists and techy's together in one place at one time, all of whom have smartphones. Uh, it tends to come up the signals. There were times where Las Vegas, you have to understand, is has got

phenomenal connectivity. Al Right, So in the in the convention center, there was WiFi, there was three G access, there was edge access. I mean, all this stuff was available, but you also had tons and tons of people and devices using this bandwidth. So it got kind of got kind of difficult to rely upon this this technology, but there were some really cool ones there. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, I think I maybe one of the last people in

America to have a dumb phone. Um. Actually, my, my, my dumb phone is actually kind of smart because it's gotten WiFi connectivity, so I can go into an area where there isn't necessarily a signal and if there's a hotspot, it'll connect to it. So all phones are getting a little smarter, Yeah, they are. I guess we can kind of sort of define what a smartphone is versus a

regular phone. It's a little it's a little harder to define now because, like you say, a lot of the regular cell phones are now getting the capability is that traditionally we would call a smartphone capability. But let's go back a little bit. We'll talk about some of the early smartphones to like you know, the Palm Trios and the Blackberries and that kind of thing to kind of kind of explain. So a smartphone, it, uh, it can

do more than a regular cell phone. It it usually there's um, at the very least, some scheduling software on the phone, some sort of calendar program Uh, there's a usually a really complex contacts management system. There's usually some form of email on their UM. It has its own operating system, just like a computer would. Uh. A cell phones due to but those are usually pretty rudimentary. The the smartphone, cell phone, it's comparable to, you know, a

severely underpowered computer. But a computer, it's got to operate system just as a computer would. Okay, So if you had, for example, a Motorola rasor very popular phone UM and you compared it to a BlackBerry or Palm Trio, you would see that Motorola has its own proprietary Razor operating system that does some of those things that you were

talking about. But if you were using the BlackBerry, the BlackBerry has a more advanced operating system, Palm has the you know, the Palm os um or if you were using a Windows mobile device, you'd be using a Windows operating system. An iPhone has an iPhone has its own operating system, and of course there's the Android operating system, and there there are several operators, Symbian operating system. There's several operating systems on the market. They all essentially do

the same thing. They all they all act as a foundation for applications, and these different smartphones have different applications. Some of them have applications that are analogous to one another, others have applications that are peculiar only to you know, whichever a kind of smartphone you have. But the point is that the smartphone allows you to do way more stuff than just making and receiving phone calls and texts.

Sore browsing the web is another good example. A lot of a lot of cellular phones now you can do some web browsing, but usually you're web browsing on very specific sites that have a mobile device version of that site, right, And a lot of the smartphones have a large enough screen and enough processing power that you can go and look at the regular site as opposed to the mobile version of the site. Because the mobile version tends to be stripped down, a lot of the features are gone.

But then, you know, a lot of the smartphones you can actually look at the site as it is intended to be viewed. So although it is sort of nice to be able to, uh to see um, something of the entirety of the page versus you know, a very very tiny version of the official web page. Now a lot of the A lot of the smartphones also have a pretty simple interface for zooming in and zooming out of web pages so that you can kind of get

around that. You know, you don't have to you know, you don't have to put on your reading glasses and grab a magnifying glass to read the CNN page because suddenly everything shrunk down to a teeny tiny size. Usually you can expand and contract the window so that you can zoom in on anything that looks interesting and uh if you zoom out and makes navigating the web page a lot faster. You know, you don't have to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to try and finally get

to where you're going. Um. But yeah, for the longest time, these smartphones, they were really the in the realm of business. I mean it was it was enterprise, the enterprise exactly it was. It was meant for people who had to stay connected to their office, to their job while they did lots and lots of traveling, like executives who had to go to a lot of meetings, whether it was on site or off site. The phone allowed them to have a direct connection to things like their email and

even their office phone. You can know, a lot of them would allow you to bridge phone calls from office to your your smartphone, UM, so that they could be extremely responsive um and if something came up, they could act on it to meet a LYE as opposed to having to wait to either talk to an assistant or go back to their office or whatever. Well, it makes sense for people who are constantly on the road to

be able to have that kind of functionality. I mean, you know you're in the airport, you're waiting for your luggage. If you're one of the people that you know check your luggage, I guess um fewer a number of these days now there's a fee for that. But UM, you know you're waiting on something at the airport, you can go ahead and catch up on your email. You can uh,

you know, make a conference call. You've got your calendar right there and it's SYNCD up with the exchange server UM at your company, and you've got all that information. Even the newer GPS phones you can get directions onto you know where your hotel is and move on to that. It makes sense that you'd want one device that can handle all those different applications than carrying a p D A and a phone, you know, maybe even a paper

planner with you. You know, it seems like, uh, it would be a valuable tool at least for the business person. And there's a double edged sword there, which means which is that people, once they realize you have one of these, know that they can get in a hold of you

at any time, anywhere. And so that's the other side of the coin, is that owning a smartphone on the enterprise side at any rate, means you sacrifice a lot of your whatever freedom you may have had during the day, because people know they can get ahold of you and get in touch with you. Um, and they don't have to go through an assistant, and they don't have to worry about leaving voicemail necessarily because you'll get the the the notification as soon as it happens, assuming your phone

is on. And um that yeah, I know some people who regret that part of the equation. But then, of course, as I'm sure almost everyone out there has heard, these things are can be very very addictive. Uh. There's another name for a BlackBerry that's pretty popular, crackberry. Yeah, and that's because people once they start using it, they really do become accustomed to it, and then they start to depend on it, and uh yeah, before too long, it's

intervention time. Yeah. The thing is, that's sort of funny about it. You you would think that that would become, you know, something that you might want to get away from. But it seems that more consumers are turning to smartphones. I think. I think there are two things in particular that have started to to appear in smartphones that have attracted more and more consumers. Two things I think that have attracted them the most are music players smartphones that

incorporate some sort of MP three player, and cameras. A lot of the smartphones now have cameras. I think there's some that have up to you know, five or six megapixels, which is pretty impressive for a for a a phone, you know, for a digital camera, you know, you can get the ten or twelve or whatever before a phone to have five or six, considering that that's not the

main purpose of the phone, that's pretty impressive. And a lot of them have multimedia capabilities where you can take a video with your phone and then send it to someone else, or you know, pictures, or you can do geo tagging. Because if it has a GPS system. It can actually detect where you are automatically tagged the photos you're making. And then a lot of them have applications where you can do things like interact with services like Facebook, so you just with a touch of a button send

your pictures to your Facebook account. They're already tagged. It can tell people what it is and where it is. It's you know, it's just making this whole connectivity thing so much easier. So that I think is what pulled people in. Plus, I mean, the prices started going down

a lot of them. A lot of the manufacturers struck deals with carriers, so for in return for a like a two year contract with some carrier, you might be able to get one of these smartphones for just a couple hundred bucks, you know, on their own, they would

be close to eight hundred or nine hundred dollars. Sure. Um. Yeah, As a matter of fact, I was, I was doing some research on this, and industry analyst Gardner said that the smartphone segment of the market, uh was in the second quarter of two thousand and eight, and um, it was even up eleven point five percent in the third quarter of two thousand and eight. Even though we were seeing signs of the economic downturn. It was weak year

over year. UM. I think you know, it's possible that that may even be partly because of the saturation of the market now with shartphones. UM North America is definitely the fastest growing segment. UM that there are thirty six point five million worldwide, which is pretty impressive. UM. I would say that there might even be another application, uh that is more popular and even newer smartphones that that might be helping their popularity. In addition to the music

and the cameras, games games are big. Like if you look at the the iPhone, the iTunes store and look at the applications, games are huge, absolutely, even though there are some fantastic productivity and and other applications in their games are a huge segment. And the ability to UM take your you know, photo, video game, phone, calendar, email

machine with you everywhere you go, it's pretty compelling. Yeah, I think the iPhone, we can we can probably credit the iPhone with almost single handedly propelling the smartphone market into the consumer market, I mean all on its own pretty much. I mean there there were other people who were buying smartphones for their own use rather than for for the office. Like you know, you had people who were by a BlackBerry just to have a BlackBerry, not so that they would you know, suddenly be able to

be joined at the hip to whatever company they worked for. Um, but I think the iPhone really that's the name of Apple. Their reputation for designing really beautiful products that work that really went a long way. And plus, like you say, the applications, uhh, that that really put iPhone over the top. They had this huge potential for applications that could do anything. I mean everything from business applications to games, to social

media applications. All of that suddenly became available and people said, hey, I can have a device that's as powerful as a as a computer essentially that lets me do all these things that I do on the computer. Anyway, why wouldn't I get one of these instead of getting you know, another laptop. Well, that's true. Let's make phone calls on it. There you go, um and it. The iPhone also inspired a slew of competitors for people like Samsung and l G and um, you know, Nokia has come out with

a couple that are are pretty interesting. Um, BlackBerry too, I mean, you like the BlackBerry Curve, the BlackBerry Bold, the BlackBerry Flip, You're all flip. But all of those are in some way a kind of calling out to the consumer market rather than in the traditional business market. And and by that very nature, they are competing with

the iPhone. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, most of them used the Sembia or you know, of course, the Blackbays used the rim operating system that comes with it. But they do have a new competitor, and you've had some experience with that competitor. Would you like to to mention what my my new toy is. For a long time, it was rumored that search giant Google you may have heard of them, was going to come out with their

own phone, and that turned out not to be true. However, they did come out with their own phone operating system, and they are partnering with lots and lots of phone manufacturers, and the first to hit the market was HTC, the Chinese hardware manufacturer. UM. They've made phones for lots of different people, and some of them actually they have a sizeable share of the market, except that you might not know it because they actually appear as the T mobile

something or they split something. UM. They don't appear as the HTC name, but HTC actually is putting their name on the g One. Yes, the HTC g One, also sometimes known as the HTC Dream, runs on the Android operating system. It was one of my Christmas wishless items and I got. It's awesome. So yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about my impressions of the phone. If you can't tell, I enjoy it. Um, it's very

It's very like the the iPhone in some respects. It's got the big touch screen, right, it has a touch screens, not multi touch. It is only single touch, so unlike the iPhone, not multi touch. That's you know, that's definitely iPhones got it over that. iPhone also had a huge jump start in the applications market, and that's still the case. iPhone has more applications available than Google's. But on the other hand, the Google application system, it's open. Anyone can

create a an application for Android. They can upload it, um, you know, they can. It can be fee shar in Google side, or you can find it somewhere else. You don't have to go through Google to get an application for your phone. Now with iPhone, it's very much a controlled system. Your application for the iPhone has to be approved by Apple and it has to appear in their store in order for you to get your hands on it, unless you have a jailbroken iPhone. UM. But with Google

it's different. You can you can create an application and host it somewhere, just let people know where it is and they can go and grab it. That doesn't have to go through Google. UM. Google does have a kill switch, which means that they have the option to stop and essentially destroy an application if it turns out to be malicious. So if someone were to make an UM some kind of computer virus or uh phishing software whatever, Google could step in and intervene before it got out of control.

So UM. But yeah, touchscreen device, lots of need applications. It's got GPS, three G capability, WiFi uh one downside, battery life not so good. No, but I heard a rumor that they were going to come out with a newer, bigger battery that might help with that. I've heard that, I've actually seen pictures of it. UM. It does look like that it would increase the thickness of the phone by quite a bit, which would probably turn off some users. Personally, I would I would trade the the sleekness for the

battery life any day. I mean, I would much prefer to have my phone last longer. And it was incredibly useful. On my most recent trip to UM to C E. S. I actually had my entire schedule down on my phone and I could refer to it whenever I needed to and see, oh, I need to get to the South Hall because I'm meeting with so and so. In fifteen minutes, I'm at the North Hall. How do I sprout wings and fly? But at least it told me what was going on. I didn't have to carry around a planner.

I didn't have to carry. In fact, on Friday, I was there for Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the C E. S Show. On Friday, I didn't experiment. I did not take my computer with me. All I took was a backpack to carry all the press kits I was going to get and my phone. And you know what, it worked like a charm. I did not need my notebook computer at all throughout the entire day. I could do everything I needed to do on the phone. Um. Yeah, I'm sold. I am a I'm a lifetime Android fan.

I really hope that it uh, that it takes a good um, a good hold on the market and continues to develop because I love it. Wow, that's a pretty ringing endorsement. It's an unbiased opinion and uh just on the c E S shout out. At the time of our podcast, we had not yet seen one in person, but Palm announced a new phone with a new operating system, touchscreen, and a slideout keyboard, called the Palm Pre Yeah. This thing, I've heard nothing but good things, nothing but good things

about it. It It has the ability to do things like coordinate multiple calendar nerves so that you get a single calendar view. So let's say you want to you can you can sink your your Outlook, your Google calendar, and your Facebook calendar onto a single view and see everything that you need to do that day, because of course, you may not want to put like if people have access to your Outlook calendar, you may not want to put little Susie's birthday, um, or maybe you do. I

don't know. But if you don't want to do it, and you have it on your Facebook calendar but not your Outlook calendar, this device would let you see all of that in a single view. You don't have to worry about people bugging you about that kind of thing. Um. And it also has the there's a that has one of the accessories you were talking about, Uh when we

had our CS discussion about charging wirelessly. Oh yeah, I just put it down on a surface and the charges the battery without having to hook it up to something. It's got a magnet and the magnets align the phone properly with the chargers so that it charges exactly the way it's supposed to. I used to use it at an older Palm, so it would be kind of fun. People were saying that this was Palm's last end at CS, and I think they think they pulled it out. Well,

I think they. I think that was a successful and I think there you know, if the Palm, if they can deliver it on time to the market, then I think, Uh, I think they're around for a while longer. Well, if they reach out to business and consumers, they'll have a good shot at it. Wow. Well this was a good one. Yeah, good conversation. And we do have an article on how smartphones work. We also have how Google Android works, we

have how iPhones work. All of this information that can be found right now at how stuff works dot com, and we'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you