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94-660: The HTC Inspire 4G is the first smartphone available on AT&T Mobility branded as "4G". It was first announced at CES in January 2011 and was released in February 2011. The Inspire 4G is a variant of the HTC Desire HD that was sold in Europe so the Inspire has the same design and similar specifications except that the Inspire supports AT&T's HSPA+ 4G network. The Inspire features

188-510: A mobile - platform holder , the App Store significantly changed the consumer behaviour and quickly broadened the market for mobile games, as almost every smartphone owner started to download mobile apps . Towards the end of the 20th century, mobile phone ownership became ubiquitous in the industrialised world due to the establishment of industry standards, and the rapid fall in cost of handset ownership, and use driven by economies of scale . As

282-539: A touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing , email , and social media , as well as multimedia playback and streaming . Smartphones have built-in cameras , GPS navigation , and support for various communication methods, including voice calls, text messaging , and internet-based messaging apps. Smartphones are distinguished from older-design feature phones by their more advanced hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems , access to

376-665: A " keyboard bar " form factor, like the BlackBerry line, Windows Mobile smartphones, Palm Treos , and some of the Nokia Eseries . A few hid their full physical QWERTY keyboard in a sliding form factor , like the Danger Hiptop line. Some even had only a numeric keypad using T9 text input , like the Nokia Nseries and other models in the Nokia Eseries . Resistive touchscreens with stylus -based interfaces could still be found on

470-504: A "devices and services" company. Despite the growth of Windows Phone and the Lumia range (which accounted for nearly 90% of all Windows Phone devices sold), the platform never had significant market share in the key U.S. market, and Microsoft was unable to maintain Windows Phone's momentum in the years that followed, resulting in dwindling interest from users and app developers. After Balmer

564-736: A "smartphone" began as a prototype called "Angler" developed by Canova in 1992 while at IBM and demonstrated in November of that year at the COMDEX computer industry trade show. A refined version was marketed to consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator . In addition to placing and receiving cellular calls , the touchscreen-equipped Simon could send and receive faxes and emails . It included an address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, and notepad, as well as other visionary mobile applications such as maps, stock reports and news. The IBM Simon

658-492: A 1  GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and an 8 MP camera and dual LED flash , in-camera editing, live picture effects, and a 720p camcorder to capture HD video. It has a 4.3-inch class (480×800) WVGA (16M Colors) TFT capacitive touchscreen covered by Gorilla Glass , a special crack and scratch resistant material made by Corning with multi-touch input support. The HTC Inspire 4G has 768  MB RAM and 4 GB of internal flash memory data storage. There

752-431: A 3.5" capacitive touchscreen with twice the common resolution of most smartphone screens at the time , and introduced multi-touch to phones, which allowed gestures such as "pinching" to zoom in or out on photos, maps, and web pages. The iPhone was notable as being the first device of its kind targeted at the mass market to abandon the use of a stylus, keyboard, or keypad typical of contemporary smartphones, instead using

846-556: A common approach for many mobile games going forward. Mobile gaming grew rapidly over the next several years, buoyed by rapid expansion in China . By 2016, top mobile games were earning over US$ 100 million a year, and the total revenue for the mobile games sector had surpassed that of other video game areas. Other major trends in mobile games have include the hyper-casual game such as Flappy Bird and Crossy Road and location-based games like Pokémon Go . Mobile gaming has impacted

940-466: A continuous live connection. This gameplay is different since players take individual turns in the game, therefore allowing players to continue playing against human opponents. This is done using different networks including Facebook . Some companies use a regular turn-based system where the end results are posted so all the players can see who won the tournament. Other companies take screen recordings of live players and broadcast them to other players at

1034-439: A dependence on third-party sources providing applications for multiple platforms. The advantages of a design with software powerful enough to support advanced applications and a large capacitive touchscreen affected the development of another smartphone OS platform, Android , with a more BlackBerry-like prototype device scrapped in favor of a touchscreen device with a slide-out physical keyboard, as Google's engineers thought at

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1128-414: A dual five-megapixel rear camera setup for spatial imaging, among the earliest mobile phones with more than one rear camera . The 2012 Samsung Galaxy S3 introduced the ability to capture photos using voice commands . Mobile gaming In 1997, Nokia launched Snake . Snake , which was pre-installed in most mobile devices manufactured by Nokia for a couple of years, has since become one of

1222-451: A few smartphones, like the Palm Treos , which had dropped their handwriting input after a few early models that were available in versions with Graffiti instead of a keyboard. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a shift in smartphone interfaces away from devices with physical keyboards and keypads to ones with large finger-operated capacitive touchscreens. The first phone of any kind with

1316-787: A lack of significant AR mobile games success since, with several AR mobile game projects being shut down, such as Microsoft 's Minecraft Earth and Niantic's Catan: World Explorers Since mobile devices have become present in the majority of households (at least in the developed countries ), there are more and more games created with educational , lifestyle and, health improvement purposes. For example, mobile games can be used in speech-language pathology , children's rehabilitation in hospitals (Finnish startup Rehaboo!), acquiring new useful or healthy habits ( Habitica ), memorizing things and learning languages ( Memrise ). There are also apps with similar purposes which are not games per se, in this case, they are called gamified apps . Sometimes it

1410-404: A large capacitive touchscreen as the sole means of interaction, and led to the decline of earlier, keyboard- and keypad-focused platforms. Later, navigation keys such as the home , back , menu , task and search buttons have also been increasingly replaced by nonphysical touch keys, then virtual, simulated on-screen navigation keys, commonly with access combinations such as a long press of

1504-519: A large capacitive touchscreen was the LG Prada , announced by LG in December 2006. This was a fashionable feature phone created in collaboration with Italian luxury designer Prada with a 3" 240 x 400 pixel screen, a 2-Megapixel digital camera with 144p video recording ability, an LED flash , and a miniature mirror for self portraits. In January 2007, Apple Computer introduced the iPhone . It had

1598-464: A large touchscreen for direct finger input as its main means of interaction. The iPhone's operating system was also a shift away from older operating systems (which older phones supported and which were adapted from PDAs and feature phones ) to an operative system powerful enough to not require using a limited, stripped down web browser that can only render pages specially formatted using technologies such as WML , cHTML , or XHTML and instead ran

1692-511: A later point in time to allow players to feel that they are always interacting with another human opponent. Mobile games can be distributed in one of four ways: Until the launch of Apple App Store, in the US, the majority of mobile games were sold by wireless carriers, such as AT&T Mobility , Verizon Wireless , Sprint Corporation and T-Mobile US . In Europe , games were distributed equally between carriers and off-deck, third-party stores. After

1786-481: A limited amount of cellular Internet access. PDA and mobile phone manufacturers competed in reducing the size of devices. The bulk of these smartphones combined with their high cost and expensive data plans, plus other drawbacks such as expansion limitations and decreased battery life compared to separate standalone devices, generally limited their popularity to " early adopters " and business users who needed portable connectivity. In March 1996, Hewlett-Packard released

1880-752: A major partnership with Microsoft, under which it would exclusively use Windows Phone on all of its future smartphones, and integrate Microsoft's Bing search engine and Bing Maps (which, as part of the partnership, would also license Nokia Maps data) into all future devices. The announcement led to the abandonment of both Symbian, as well as MeeGo —a Linux-based mobile platform it was co-developing with Intel. Nokia's low-end Lumia 520 saw strong demand and helped Windows Phone gain niche popularity in some markets, overtaking BlackBerry in global market share in 2013. In mid-June 2012, Meizu released its mobile operating system, Flyme OS . Many of these attempts to compete with Android and iPhone were short-lived. Over

1974-462: A number of models have developed, and a mobile game developer/publisher may use one or a combination of these models to make revenue. Many game apps are free to play through a combination of these models. Over time, mobile developers of these types of apps have observed that the bulk of their players do not spend any funds on their game, but instead revenues are generated from a small fraction, typically under 10% of their total players. Further, most of

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2068-548: A rarity even as programmables became cheap and relatively easy to obtain. It was not until the early 1990s when graphing calculators became more powerful and cheap enough to be common among high school students for use in mathematics. The new graphing calculators, with their ability to transfer files to one another and from a computer for backup, could double as game consoles. Calculators such as HP-48 and TI-82 could be programmed in proprietary programming languages such as RPL programming language or TI-BASIC directly on

2162-523: A redesigned user interface, support for gestures such as pinch-to-zoom, and a new web browser based on the same WebKit rendering engine used by the iPhone. The following year, RIM released BlackBerry OS 7 and new models in the Bold and Torch ranges, which included a new Bold with a touchscreen alongside its keyboard, and the Torch 9860—the first BlackBerry phone to not include a physical keyboard. In 2013, it replaced

2256-409: A result of this explosion, technological advancement by handset manufacturers became rapid. With these technological advances, mobile phone games also became increasingly sophisticated, taking advantage of exponential improvements in display , processing , storage , interfaces , network bandwidth and operating system functionality. The first such game that demonstrated the desire for handset games

2350-416: A rotary knob ring around the lens and a tripod mount. While screen sizes have increased, manufacturers have attempted to make smartphones thinner at the expense of utility and sturdiness, since a thinner frame is more vulnerable to bending and has less space for components, namely battery capacity. The iPhone and later touchscreen-only Android devices together popularized the slate form factor , based on

2444-401: A security update for various HTC and carrier applications used in the previous software update. In the xda-developers forum, user software is available for the device with Android 4.4.4 via Cyanogenmod 11. Original specs pointed out the existence of HSUPA to enhance the upload speeds under the 3G network, but as early adopters inquired about slow upload connections, AT&T replied that

2538-402: A stamina-like gameplay feature found in social-network games like FarmVille to limit the number of times one could play it in a single period, but allowed optional in-app purchases to restore that stamina immediately and continue playing. This new monetization brought in millions of players to both games and millions of dollars in revenue, establishing the " freemium " model that would be

2632-579: A variety of wireless communication standards, including LTE , 5G NR , Wi-Fi , Bluetooth , and satellite navigation . By the mid-2020s, manufacturers began integrating satellite messaging and emergency services, expanding their utility in remote areas without reliable cellular coverage . Following the rising popularity of the iPhone in the late 2000s, the majority of smartphones have featured thin, slate-like form factors with large, capacitive touch screens with support for multi-touch gestures rather than physical keyboards. Most modern smartphones have

2726-571: A version of Apple's Safari browser that could render full websites not specifically designed for mobile phones. Later Apple shipped a software update that gave the iPhone a built-in on-device App Store allowing direct wireless downloads of third-party software. This kind of centralized App Store and free developer tools quickly became the new main paradigm for all smartphone platforms for software development , distribution , discovery, installation , and payment, in place of expensive developer tools that required official approval to use and

2820-427: A wide variety of platforms and technologies. These include the (today largely defunct) Palm OS , Symbian , Adobe Flash Lite , NTT DoCoMo 's DoJa , Sun 's Java , Qualcomm 's BREW , WIPI , BlackBerry , Nook and early incarnations of Windows Mobile . Today, the most widely supported platforms are Apple 's iOS and Google 's Android . The mobile version of Microsoft 's Windows 10 (formerly Windows Phone )

2914-589: Is also a single microSDHC slot, which can accept a microSDHC card with a capacity of up to 32 GB of data storage. The Inspire launched with Android 2.2.1 Froyo with the custom HTC Sense 2.0 skin as the user interface. The OS was later updated on 8 August 2011 to Android 2.3.3 with Sense 2.1 and again on 31 July 2012 to Android 2.3.5 with Sense 3.0. In May 2011, AT&T issued an update allowing unknown sources to be installed, which allows users to sideload applications. On 25 July 2011 AT&T issued Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread , HTC Sense 2.1, and various fixes to

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3008-404: Is also actively supported, although in terms of market share remains marginal compared to iOS and Android. Java was at one time the most common platform for mobile games, however its performance limits led to the adoption of various native binary formats for more sophisticated games. Due to its ease of porting between mobile operating systems and extensive developer community, Unity is one of

3102-408: Is difficult to draw a line between multipurpose games and gamified apps. Many mobile games support multiple players, either remotely over a network or locally via Wi-Fi , Bluetooth or similar technology. There are several options for playing multiplayer games on mobile phones: live synchronous tournaments and turn-based asynchronous tournaments. In live tournaments random players from around

3196-462: The App Store in 2008 radically changed the market. The iPhone's focus on larger memory, multitasks , and additional sensing devices , including the touchscreen in later model, made it ideal for casual games , while the App Store, which is also independent from mobile carriers , made it easy for developers to create and post apps to publish, and for users to search for and obtain new games. Further,

3290-543: The Game Boy Color and WonderSwan , respectively. By 2001, i-mode had 20 million users in Japan, along with more advanced handsets with graphics comparable to 8-bit consoles . A wide variety of games were available for the i-mode service, along with announcements from established video game developers such as Taito , Konami, Namco , and Hudson Soft , including ports of classic arcade games and 8-bit console games . By

3384-487: The J-SH04 , a Sharp J-Phone model sold in Japan in November 2000. It could instantly transmit pictures via cell phone telecommunication . By the mid-2000s, higher-end cell phones commonly had integrated digital cameras. In 2003 camera phones outsold stand-alone digital cameras, and in 2006 they outsold film and digital stand-alone cameras. Five billion camera phones were sold in five years, and by 2007 more than half of

3478-1028: The Japanese market , such as mobile payments and shopping, near-field communication (NFC) allowing mobile wallet functionality to replace smart cards for transit fares, loyalty cards, identity cards, event tickets, coupons, money transfer, etc., downloadable content like musical ringtones , games , and comics , and 1seg mobile television . Phones built by Japanese manufacturers used custom firmware , however, and did not yet feature standardized mobile operating systems designed to cater to third-party application development , so their software and ecosystems were akin to very advanced feature phones . As with other feature phones, additional software and services required partnerships and deals with providers. The degree of integration between phones and carriers, unique phone features, non-standardized platforms, and tailoring to Japanese culture made it difficult for Japanese manufacturers to export their phones, especially when demand

3572-580: The Nokia 9000 Communicator , a digital cellular PDA based on the Nokia 2110 with an integrated system based on the PEN/GEOS 3.0 operating system from Geoworks . The two components were attached by a hinge in what became known as a clamshell design , with the display above and a physical QWERTY keyboard below. The PDA provided e-mail ; calendar, address book, calculator and notebook applications; text-based Web browsing; and could send and receive faxes. When closed,

3666-553: The Nokia N8 , Sony Ericsson Satio , and Samsung M8910 Pixon12 feature phone had 12 MP. The main camera of the 2009 Nokia N86 uniquely features a three-level aperture lens. The Altek Leo, a 14-megapixel smartphone with 3x optical zoom lens and 720p HD video camera was released in late 2010. In 2011, the same year the Nintendo 3DS was released, HTC unveiled the Evo 3D , a 3D phone with

3760-551: The OmniGo 700LX , a modified HP 200LX palmtop PC with a Nokia 2110 mobile phone piggybacked onto it and ROM -based software to support it. It had a 640 × 200 resolution CGA compatible four-shade gray-scale LCD screen and could be used to place and receive calls, and to create and receive text messages, emails and faxes. It was also 100% DOS 5.0 compatible, allowing it to run thousands of existing software titles, including early versions of Windows . In August 1996, Nokia released

3854-553: The Pre 3 and HP TouchPad tablet. As part of a proposed divestment of its consumer business to focus on enterprise software, HP abruptly ended development of future webOS devices in August 2011, and sold the rights to webOS to LG Electronics in 2013, for use as a smart TV platform. Research in Motion introduced the vertical-sliding BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry OS 6 in 2010, which featured

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3948-764: The TI-59 , published in BYTE in October 1980. The magazine also published a version of Hunt the Wumpus for the HP-41C . Few other games exist for the earliest of programmable calculators (including the Hewlett-Packard 9100A , one of the first scientific calculators), such as the long-popular Lunar Lander game often used as an early programming exercise. However, limited program address space and lack of easy program storage made calculator gaming

4042-479: The installed base of all mobile phones were camera phones. Sales of separate cameras peaked in 2008. Many early smartphones did not have cameras at all, and earlier models that had them had low performance and insufficient image and video quality that could not compete with budget pocket cameras and fulfill user's needs. By the beginning of the 2010s almost all smartphones had an integrated digital camera. The decline in sales of stand-alone cameras accelerated due to

4136-571: The internet , business applications, mobile payments , and multimedia functionality, including music, video, gaming , radio , and television . Smartphones typically feature metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) chips, various sensors, and support for multiple wireless communication protocols. These devices leverage sensors such as accelerometers , barometers , gyroscopes , and magnetometers , which can be used by both pre-installed and third-party software to enhance functionality. In addition, smartphones are equipped to support

4230-475: The " Pocket PC " versions of what was later Windows Mobile , and the UIQ interface that was originally designed for pen-based PDAs on Symbian OS devices resulted in some early smartphones having stylus-based interfaces. These allowed for virtual keyboards and handwriting input, thus also allowing easy entry of Asian characters. By the mid-2000s, the majority of smartphones had a physical QWERTY keyboard. Most used

4324-495: The 1990s, or lithium-ion batteries used in modern smartphones. The term "smart phone" (in two words) was not coined until a year after the introduction of the Simon, appearing in print as early as 1995, describing AT&T's PhoneWriter Communicator. The term "smartphone" (as one word) was first used by Ericsson in 1997 to describe a new device concept, the GS88 . Beginning in

4418-514: The 2000s, NTT DoCoMo 's i-mode platform, BlackBerry , Nokia 's Symbian platform, and Windows Mobile began to gain market traction, with models often featuring QWERTY keyboards or resistive touchscreen input and emphasizing access to push email and wireless internet . In the early 1990s, IBM engineer Frank Canova realised that chip-and-wireless technology was becoming small enough to use in handheld devices . The first commercially available device that could be properly referred to as

4512-445: The 2000s, as over US$ 3 billion worth of games were sold in 2007 internationally, and projected annual growth of over 40%. Ownership of a smartphone alone increases the likelihood that a consumer will play mobile games. Over 90% of smartphone users play a mobile game at least once a week. Many mobile games are distributed free to the end user, but carry paid advertising: examples are Flappy Bird and Doodle Jump . The latter follows

4606-434: The 2001 game BotFighters , were closer to research prototypes rather than being commercial successes. Location-based mobile games sometimes have augmented reality functionality, such as in the case of the 2016 game Pokémon Go . Usually in these cases the augmented reality functionality is not at the center of the experience. Mobile devices have been used as a platform for Augmented reality (AR in short) games, using

4700-561: The App Store added the ability to support in-app purchases in October 2009. This allowed games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope to find new monetization models away from the traditional premium "pay once" model. Meanwhile, Apple's disruption caused the market to stabilized around iPhone devices and Google's Android -based phones which offered a similar app store through Google Play . A further major shift game with 2012's Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons , games that used

4794-507: The Inspire 4G is not HSUPA capable. However, the Inspire 4G is fully capable of HSUPA, but it was disabled by AT&T for unknown reasons. By 30 April 2011 AT&T issued an over the air (OTA) update enabling HSUPA for the HTC Inspire 4G. Smartphone A smartphone , often simply called a phone , is a mobile device that combines the functionality of a traditional mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has

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4888-515: The ability for users to download or purchase additional applications from a centralized app store . They often have support for cloud storage and cloud synchronization, and virtual assistants . Smartphones have largely replaced personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, handheld/palm-sized PCs , portable media players (PMP), point-and-shoot cameras , camcorders , and, to a lesser extent, handheld video game consoles , e-reader devices, pocket calculators , and GPS tracking units . Since

4982-469: The built-in games of non- Java or BREW enabled cell phones . Games continue to be programmed on graphing calculators with increasing complexity. A wave of games appeared after the release of the TI-83 Plus / TI-84 Plus series , among TI's first graphing calculators to natively support assembly. TI-BASIC programming also rose in popularity after the release of third-party libraries. Assembly remained

5076-432: The calculator; programs could also be written in assembly language or (less often) C on a desktop computer and transferred to the calculator. As calculators became more powerful and memory sizes increased, games increased in complexity. By the 1990s, programmable calculators were able to run implementations by hobbyists of games such as Lemmings and Doom (Lemmings for HP-48 was released in 1993; Doom for HP-48

5170-416: The captured background, and will be rendered app memorizing as the player moves the device around. The most successful and notable example for a mobile game that has an augmented reality feature is Pokémon Go (2016), where the player travels to locations marked on their GPS map and then can enable the augmented reality mode to find Pokémon creatures to capture. However, as of January 2022 there has been

5264-483: The company announced that it would also exit the hardware market to focus more on software and its enterprise middleware, and began to license the BlackBerry brand and its Android distribution to third-party OEMs such as TCL for future devices. In September 2013, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Nokia's mobile device business for $ 7.1 billion, as part of a strategy under CEO Steve Ballmer for Microsoft to be

5358-427: The course of the decade, the two platforms became a clear duopoly in smartphone sales and market share, with BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and other operating systems eventually stagnating to little or no measurable market share. In 2015, BlackBerry began to pivot away from its in-house mobile platforms in favor of producing Android devices, focusing on a security-enhanced distribution of the software. The following year,

5452-462: The device could be used as a digital cellular telephone. In June 1999 Qualcomm released the "pdQ Smartphone", a CDMA digital PCS smartphone with an integrated Palm PDA and Internet connectivity. Subsequent landmark devices included: In 1999, Japanese wireless provider NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode , a new mobile internet platform which provided data transmission speeds up to 9.6 kilobits per second, and access web services available through

5546-401: The device's camera(s) to as an input for the game. While playing the game, the player aims the device's camera at a location and through the device's screen, sees the area captured by the camera plus computer-generated graphics atop it, augmenting the display and then allowing the player to interact that way. The graphics are generally drawn as to make the generated image appear to be part of

5640-433: The early 2010s, improved hardware and faster wireless communication have bolstered the growth of the smartphone industry . As of 2014, over a billion smartphones are sold globally every year. In 2019 alone, 1.54 billion smartphone units were shipped worldwide. 75.05 percent of the world population were smartphone users as of 2020. Early smartphones were marketed primarily towards the enterprise market, attempting to bridge

5734-600: The functionality of standalone PDA devices with support for cellular telephony , but were limited by their bulky form, short battery life , slow analog cellular networks, and the immaturity of wireless data services. These issues were eventually resolved with the exponential scaling and miniaturization of MOS transistors down to sub-micron levels ( Moore's law ), the improved lithium-ion battery , faster digital mobile data networks ( Edholm's law ), and more mature software platforms that allowed mobile device ecosystems to develop independently of data providers . In

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5828-466: The iPhone; Palm unveiled a new platform known as webOS for its Palm Pre in late-2009 to replace Palm OS , which featured a focus on a task-based "card" metaphor and seamless synchronization and integration between various online services (as opposed to the then-conventional concept of a smartphone needing a PC to serve as a "canonical, authoritative repository" for user data). HP acquired Palm in 2010 and released several other webOS devices, including

5922-526: The increasing use of smartphones with rapidly improving camera technology for casual photography, easier image manipulation , and abilities to directly share photos through the use of apps and web-based services. By 2011, cell phones with integrated cameras were selling hundreds of millions per year. In 2015, digital camera sales were 35.395 million units or only less than a third of digital camera sales numbers at their peak and also slightly less than film camera sold number at their peak. Contributing to

6016-473: The language of choice for these calculators, which run on a Zilog Z80 processor, although some assembly implements have been created to ease the difficulty of learning assembly language. For those running on a Motorola 68000 processor (like the TI-89 ), C programming (possible using TIGCC) has begun to displace assembly. Because they are easy to program without outside tools, calculator games have survived despite

6110-416: The larger video game market by drawing demand away from handheld video game consoles ; both Nintendo and Sony had seen major drops in sales of their 2011 handhelds compared to their 2004 predecessors as a result of mobile gaming. At the same time, mobile gaming introduced the concept of microconsoles , low-cost, low-powered home video game consoles that used mobile operating systems to take advantage of

6204-617: The launch of Apple App Store, the mobile OS platforms like Apple iOS , Google Android , and Microsoft Windows Phone , the mobile OS developers themselves have launched digital download storefronts that can be run on the devices using the OS or from software used on PCs. These storefronts (like Apple's iOS App Store ) act as centralized digital download services from which a variety of entertainment media and software can be downloaded, including games and nowadays majority of games are distributed through them. The popularity of mobile games has increased in

6298-533: The legacy BlackBerry OS with a revamped, QNX -based platform known as BlackBerry 10 , with the all-touch BlackBerry Z10 and keyboard-equipped Q10 as launch devices. In 2010, Microsoft unveiled a replacement for Windows Mobile known as Windows Phone , featuring a new touchscreen-centric user interface built around flat design and typography, a home screen with "live tiles" containing feeds of updates from apps, as well as integrated Microsoft Office apps. In February 2011, Nokia announced that it had entered into

6392-535: The main image with a macro focus shot . In 2007 the Nokia N95 was notable as a smartphone that had a 5.0 Megapixel (MP) camera, when most others had cameras with around 3 MP or less than 2 MP. Some specialized feature phones like the LG Viewty , Samsung SGH-G800 , and Sony Ericsson K850i , all released later that year, also had 5.0 MP cameras. By 2010 5.0 MP cameras were common; a few smartphones had 8.0 MP cameras and

6486-552: The mid-2000s there was a large market for mobile games, of which many were built on the Java ME platform that many devices at the time supported. Earlier they could be obtained using SMS short codes before manufacturers as well as mobile network operators started offering them for download both on the Web (on a PC to be transferred to the device) or directly via the air (using GPRS , 3G or Wi-Fi ). The launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007 and

6580-526: The mid-to-late 1990s, many people who had mobile phones carried a separate dedicated PDA device, running early versions of operating systems such as Palm OS , Newton OS , Symbian or Windows CE / Pocket PC . These operating systems would later evolve into early mobile operating systems . Most of the "smartphones" in this era were hybrid devices that combined these existing familiar PDA OSes with basic phone hardware. The results were devices that were bulkier than either dedicated mobile phones or PDAs, but allowed

6674-418: The most played games, at one point found on more than 350 million devices worldwide. Mobile devices became more computationally advanced allowing for downloading of games, though these were initially limited to phone carriers' own stores. Mobile gaming grew greatly with the development of app stores in 2008, such as the iOS App Store from Apple . As the first mobile content marketplace operated directly by

6768-470: The most widely used engines used by modern mobile games. Apple provide a number of proprietary technologies (such as Metal ) intended to allow developers to make more effective use of their hardware in iOS-native games. With the introduction of the iOS App Store and support for in-app purchases by October 2009, the methods through which mobile games earn revenue have diverged significantly away from traditional game models on consoles or computers. Since 2009,

6862-452: The phone. On 31 July 2012 HTC released software update 3.20.502.52 OTA. New features included: Android 2.3.5, HTC Sense 3.0, Task Manager, and AT&T Address Book. Fixes/Updates included: Call optimization improvements, improved security functionality, SMS/MMS contact display fix, background data use improvement, and slightly longer battery life. This was the last official update for the phone's operating system. In March 2013, AT&T issued

6956-527: The platform level) place constraints on file size that presently rule out the direct migration of many modern PC and console games to mobile. One major problem for developers and publishers of mobile games is describing a game in such detail that it gives the customer enough information to make a purchasing decision. Games played on a mobile device using localization technology like GPS are called location-based games or location-based mobile games . These are not only played on mobile hardware but also integrate

7050-671: The platform such as online shopping. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode used cHTML , a language which restricted some aspects of traditional HTML in favor of increasing data speed for the devices. Limited functionality, small screens and limited bandwidth allowed for phones to use the slower data speeds available. The rise of i-mode helped NTT DoCoMo accumulate an estimated 40 million subscribers by the end of 2001, and ranked first in market capitalization in Japan and second globally. Japanese cell phones increasingly diverged from global standards and trends to offer other forms of advanced services and smartphone-like functionality that were specifically tailored to

7144-543: The player's position into the game concept. In other words, while it does not matter for a normal mobile game where exactly the player is (play them anywhere at any time), the player's coordinate and movement are the main elements in a location-based mobile game. A well known example is the outdoor recreational activity of geocaching , which can be played on any mobile device with integrated or external GPS receiver. External GPS receivers are usually connected via Bluetooth . Several other location-based mobile games, such as

7238-531: The proliferation of mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDAs . Total global revenue from mobile games was estimated at $ 2.6 billion in 2005 by Informa Telecoms and Media . Total revenue in 2008 was $ 5.8 billion. The largest mobile gaming markets were in the Asia-Pacific nations Japan and China , followed by the United States . In 2012, the market had already reached $ 7.8 billion A new report

7332-518: The rest of the world. Phones that made effective use of any significant data connectivity were still rare outside Japan until the introduction of the Danger Hiptop in 2002, which saw moderate success among U.S. consumers as the T-Mobile Sidekick. Later, in the mid-2000s, business users in the U.S. started to adopt devices based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile , and then BlackBerry smartphones from Research In Motion . American users popularized

7426-656: The revenue is generated by a very small fraction, about 2%, of the total players, who routinely spend large amounts of money on the game. A similar split on revenue had been seen in social-network games played in browsers . These players are known as "whales", inspired by same term used for high rolling gamblers . The social nature of a mobile game has also been found to affect its revenue, as games that encourage players to work in teams or clans will lead to increased spending from engaged players. Mobile games tend to be small in scope (in relation to mainstream PC and console games). Storage and memory limitations (sometimes dictated at

7520-412: The rise in popularity of smartphones being used over dedicated cameras for photography, smaller pocket cameras have difficulty producing bokeh in images, but nowadays, some smartphones have dual-lens cameras that reproduce the bokeh effect easily, and can even rearrange the level of bokeh after shooting. This works by capturing multiple images with different focus settings, then combining the background of

7614-555: The standalone handset can when necessary be inserted into a tablet -sized screen unit with integrated supportive battery and used as such. In 2013 and 2014, Samsung experimented with the hybrid combination of compact camera and smartphone, releasing the Galaxy S4 Zoom and K Zoom , each equipped with integrated 10× optical zoom lens and manual parameter settings (including manual exposure and focus) years before these were widely adapted among smartphones. The S4 Zoom additionally has

7708-542: The task key to simulate a short menu key press, as with home button to search. More recent "bezel-less" types have their screen surface space extended to the unit's front bottom to compensate for the display area lost for simulating the navigation keys. While virtual keys offer more potential customizability, their location may be inconsistent among systems depending on screen rotation and software used. Multiple vendors attempted to update or replace their existing smartphone platforms and devices to better-compete with Android and

7802-467: The term "CrackBerry" in 2006 due to the BlackBerry's addictive nature. In the U.S., the high cost of data plans and relative rarity of devices with Wi-Fi capabilities that could avoid cellular data network usage kept adoption of smartphones mainly to business professionals and " early adopters ." Outside the U.S. and Japan, Nokia was seeing success with its smartphones based on Symbian , originally developed by Psion for their personal organisers, and it

7896-484: The time that a touchscreen could not completely replace a physical keyboard and buttons. Android is based around a modified Linux kernel, again providing more power than mobile operating systems adapted from PDAs and feature phones. The first Android device, the horizontal-sliding HTC Dream , was released in September 2008. In 2012, Asus started experimenting with a convertible docking system named PadFone , where

7990-489: The wide variety of games available on these platforms. Calculator gaming is a form of gaming in which games are played on programmable calculators , especially graphing calculators . In 1980, Casio 's MG-880 pocket calculator had a built-in "Invaders" game (essentially a downscaled Space Invaders clone), released in the Summer that year. Another early example is the type-in program Darth Vader's Force Battle for

8084-423: The world are matched together to compete. This is done using different networks such as Game Center , Google Play Games , and Facebook . In asynchronous tournaments, there are two methods used by game developers centered around the idea that players matches are recorded and then broadcast at a later time to other players in the same tournament. Asynchronous gameplay resolves the issue of needing players to have

8178-491: Was a version of Snake that Nokia had included on its devices since 1997. In 1999, NTT Docomo launched the i-mode mobile platform in Japan, allowing mobile games to be downloaded onto smartphones . Several Japanese video game developers announced games for the i-mode platform that year, such as Konami announcing its dating simulation Tokimeki Memorial . The same year, Nintendo and Bandai were developing mobile phone adapters for their handheld game consoles ,

8272-494: Was created in 1995 ). Some games such as Dope Wars caused controversy when students played them in school. The look and feel of these games on an HP-48 class calculator, due to the lack of dedicated audio and video circuitry providing hardware acceleration, can at most be compared to the one offered by 8-bit handheld consoles such as the early Game Boy or the Gameking ( low resolution , monochrome or grayscale graphics), or to

8366-401: Was manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric , which integrated features with its own cellular radio technologies. It featured a liquid-crystal display (LCD) and PC Card support. The Simon was commercially unsuccessful, particularly due to its bulky form factor and limited battery life , using NiCad batteries rather than the nickel–metal hydride batteries commonly used in mobile phones in

8460-477: Was released in November 2015 showing that 1887 app developers would make more than one million dollars on the Google and iOS app stores in 2015. Mobile gaming revenue reached $ 50.4 billion in 2017, occupying 43% of the entire global gaming market and poised for further growth. It is expected to surpass the combined revenues from both PC gaming and console gaming in 2018. Mobile games have been developed to run on

8554-536: Was so high in Japan that the companies did not feel the need to look elsewhere for additional profits. The rise of 3G technology in other markets and non-Japanese phones with powerful standardized smartphone operating systems , app stores , and advanced wireless network capabilities allowed non-Japanese phone manufacturers to finally break in to the Japanese market, gradually adopting Japanese phone features like emojis , mobile payments, NFC, etc. and spreading them to

8648-756: Was succeeded by Satya Nadella (who has placed a larger focus on software and cloud computing) as CEO of Microsoft, it took a $ 7.6 billion write-off on the Nokia assets in July 2015, and laid off nearly the entire Microsoft Mobile unit in May 2016. Prior to the completion of the sale to Microsoft, Nokia released a series of Android-derived smartphones for emerging markets known as Nokia X , which combined an Android-based platform with elements of Windows Phone and Nokia's feature phone platform Asha , using Microsoft and Nokia services rather than Google. The first commercial camera phone

8742-471: Was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210 , released in Japan in May 1999. It was called a "mobile videophone" at the time, and had a 110,000- pixel front-facing camera . It could send up to two images per second over Japan's Personal Handy-phone System (PHS) cellular network , and store up to 20 JPEG digital images , which could be sent over e-mail . The first mass-market camera phone was

8836-646: Was the most popular smartphone OS in Europe during the middle to late 2000s. Initially, Nokia's Symbian smartphones were focused on business with the Eseries , similar to Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices at the time. From 2002 onwards, Nokia started producing consumer-focused smartphones, popularized by the entertainment-focused Nseries . Until 2010, Symbian was the world's most widely used smartphone operating system. The touchscreen personal digital assistant (PDA)–derived nature of adapted operating systems like Palm OS ,

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