Mobile phone features

The features of mobile phones are the set of capabilities, services and applications that they offer to their users. mobile phones are often referred to as feature phones, and offer basic telephony. Handsets with more advanced computing ability through the use of native soo try to differentiate their own products by implementing additional functions to make them more attractive to consumers. This has led to great innovation in mobile phone development over the past 20 years.

The common components found on all phones are:

All mobile phones are designed to work on cellular networks and contain a standard set of services that allow phones of different types and in different countries to communicate with each other. However, they can also support other features added by various manufacturers over the years:

In early stages, every mobile phone company had its own user interface, which can be considered as "closed" operating system, since there was a minimal configurability. A limited variety of basic applications (usually games, accessories like calculator or conversion tool and so on) was usually included with the phone and those were not available otherwise. Early mobile phones included basic web browser, for reading basic pages. Handhelds (Personal digital assistants like Palm, running Palm OS) were more sophisticated and also included more advanced browser and a touch screen (for use with stylus), but these were not broadly used, comparing to standard phones. Other capabilities like Pulling and Pushing Emails or working with calendar were also made more accessible but it usually required physical (and not wireless) Syncing. BlackBerry 850, an email pager, released January 19, 1999, was the first device to integrate Email.

A major step towards a more "open" mobile OS was the symbian S60 OS, that could be expanded by downloading software (written in C++, java or python), and its appearance was more configurable. In July 2008, Apple introduced its App store, which made downloading mobile applications more accessible. In October 2008, the HTC Dream was the first commercially released device to use the Linux-based Android OS, which was purchased and further developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance to create an open competitor to other major smartphone platforms of the time (Mainly Symbian operating system, BlackBerry OS, and iOS)-The operating system offered a customizable graphical user interface and a notification system showing a list of recent messages pushed from apps.

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