Introduction
The phone starts ringing, we're going to pick it up and when we touch it, the ringer volume smartly goes down! Yes! Today a company like HTC could make this kind of cellphone.
Since the launch of the IBM Simon in 1993, smartphone technology has reached levels that until recent times had only been dreamed about. Features such as wireless sharing, HD video recording and mobile internet are now commonplace and today’s average smartphone has more processing power than computers used by NASA to land a man on the moon. All over the world, the smartphone experience is being shared by more and more people every day. (Belic, 2012)
The convergence of mobile telephony, Internet services, and personal computing devices is resulting in the emergence of a “mobile Internet” (Ishii 2004; Funk 2001). The key devices for accessing the mobile Internet -currently dubbed “smartphones” - are powerful new computing devices offering traditional wireless voice service as well as native software applications and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to connect to and run a myriad of Internet-based services including email, geo-location, streaming video, and social networking, while providing a good user experience. The business opportunities presented by this new category have attracted many of the major global information and communications technology (ICT) firms, including firms from the mobile telephony, personal computer, Internet, and personal digital assistant (PDA) industries, into a complex new landscape of competition. For many of these firms, capturing a portion of the total value created by the smartphone industry is believed to be a key to future growth and profits. (Kenney, 2011)
The interest is understandable. Today more than 1.3 billion mobile phone handsets are being sold annually, and in 2010 smartphones made up almost 20% of that total (Gartner, 2010;