A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone or camera phone. Today's models also serve to combine the functions of portable media players, low-end compact digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and GPS navigation units. Modern smartphones typically also include high-resolution touchscreens, web browsers that can access and properly display standard web pages rather than just mobile-optimized sites, and high-speed data access via Wi-Fi and mobile broadband.
The most common mobile operating systems (OS) used by modern smartphones include Google's Android, Apple's iOS, Microsoft's Windows Phone, Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS, and embedded Linux distributions such as Maemo and MeeGo. Such operating systems can be installed on many different phone models, and typically each device can receive multiple OS software updates over its lifetime.
Nokia N96 is a Nokia smartphone in the Nseries range of products. It is the official successor to Nokia N95.
The handset was publicly announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, February 2008, and started shipping in September 2008. Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific are the first locations to provide the handset for consumers. The American and Chinese versions were expected shortly thereafter. The general UK release date for the N96 was October 1, although London had a separate date of September 24 when the device went on sale exclusively at Nokia's flagship stores on Regent Street and at Terminal 5 (Heathrow airport).