What is a Smartphones? When do you consider a cell phone or mobile phone a Smartphone?
First let us know what a Smartphones is. Smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. Smartphones and feature phones may be thought of as handheld computers integrated with a mobile telephone, but while most feature phones are able to run applications based on platforms such as Java ME, a smartphone usually allows the user to install and run more advanced applications. Smartphones run complete operating system software providing a platform for application developers. -Smartphone-Wikipedia 
And what are the examples of this OS-operating system?
Since this website is solely for Nokia phones, I would discuss to you Nokia’s main OS being used in most of its Smartphones, which is Symbian. Yup, Symbian OS! It was first introduced by Ericsson in 2000 for their touchscreen smartphone R380, the first phone to use the new Symbian OS, running version ER5U (Symbian OS version 5, unicode).Although this is first line of product to used Symbian OS, Nokia already have their own Smartphones realeased earlier in 1996, the Nokia 9000 Communicator, which is runnning on GEOS 3.0. operating system. And on the second quarter of 2002, Nokia released its first line of Smartphones running with the Symbian OS (version 6.1); first Series 60(S60) platform device and the first with built-in camera, the Nokia 7650.
S60 is currently amongst the most-used smartphone platforms in the world. It was created by Nokia, who made the platform open source and contributed it to the Symbian Foundation. S60 has been used by mobile device manufacturers including Siemens mobile, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic and Samsung. Sony co-created the software with Nokia. Symbian was the most popular smartphone OS on the market by 47% of the sector’s total sales, with 17.9m handsets sold in Q4 2008. -Symbian-Wikipedia
Last year, new series of Smartphones were realeased by Nokia using latest version of Symbian OS, the Symbian^3. It was announced on February 15, 2010 and was designed to be a more ‘next generation’ smartphone platform. The Symbian^3 release introduced new features such as a new 2D and 3D graphics architecture, UI improvements, and support for external displays through HDMI. It has single tap menus and up to three customizable homescreens. The Symbian^3 SDK was released September 2010. Four phones with the open source Symbian^3 have been released to the market and these are Nokia N8, Nokia C6-01, Nokia E7-00 and Nokia C7-00. Another new version of Symbian technology is the Symbian^4, which is expected to be released in the first half of 2011. Nokia, however, announced last October 2010 that Symbian^4 will not ship as a separate release on new phones, but rather as an improvements or software updates to all current Symbian^3 devices.
So what makes Symbian special and what does it do to my phone?
Symbian features pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection, like other operating systems (especially those created for use on desktop computers). EPOC’s approach to multitasking was inspired by VMS and is based on asynchronous server-based events. Symbian OS was created with three systems design principles in mind: the integrity and security of user data is paramount, user time must not be wasted, and all resources are scarce. To best follow these principles, Symbian uses a microkernel, has a request-and-callback approach to services, and maintains separation between user interface and engine. The OS is optimised for low-power battery-based devices and for ROM-based systems (e.g. features like XIP and re-entrancy in shared libraries). Applications, and the OS itself, follow an object-oriented design: Model-view-controller (MVC). Later OS iterations diluted this approach in response to market demands, notably with the introduction of a real-time kernel and a platform security model in versions 8 and 9. There is a strong emphasis on conserving resources which is exemplified by Symbian-specific programming idioms like descriptor [disambiguation needed]s and a cleanup stack. There are similar techniques for conserving disk space (though the disks on Symbian devices are usually flash memory). Furthermore, all Symbian programming is event-based, and the CPU is switched into a low 
power mode when applications are not directly dealing with an event. This is achieved through a programming idiom called active objects. Similarly the Symbian approach to threads and processes is driven by reducing overheads. Symbian has a microkernel architecture, which means that the minimum necessary is within the kernel to maximise robustness, availability and responsiveness. It contains a scheduler, memory management and device drivers, but other services like networking, telephony and filesystem support are placed in the OS Services Layer or the Base Services Layer. The inclusion of device drivers means the kernel is not a true microkernel. The EKA2 real-time kernel, which has been termed a nanokernel, contains only the most basic primitives and requires an extended kernel to implement any other abstractions. Symbian is designed to emphasise compatibility with other devices, especially removable media file systems. -Symbian-Wikipedia
Check out latest Symbian^3 Smartphones on this website!
