 5.2. Light Squared 4 have plans to use a version of this phone in a dual-mode network in the US combining terrestrial coverage with geostationary satellite coverage covered in more detail in Chapter 16. 3 http://www.isatphonelive.com/ 4 http://www.lightsquared.com/ Wireless User Hardware Table 5.1 Degrees of smartness Even smarter Smart Smarter Even smarter Even smarter Very smart very smart The smartest Phones phones phones smarter phones phones phones 2007-2012 The future? Voice Voice Voice Audio Voice Audio Imaging Voice Audio Imaging Positioning and touch-screen displays Voice Audio Imaging Positioning and Sensing touch-screen displays Other satellite networks, including the Iridium low-earth orbit satellite network, have radios that are optimised to work on a relatively long distance link - 35 000 kilometres for geo- stationary or 700 kilometres for low-earth orbit. These networks support voice services, data services and machine to machine applications (covered in more detail in Chapter 16) Specialist phones for specialist markets include Jitterbug,5 5 a phone optimised for older people manufactured by Samsung and a phone being developed for blind women. 5.2 Smart Phones But this chapter was supposed to be predominantly addressing the evolution of mobile phone and smart phone form factors and our starting point has literally just arrived by group e mail from my friend Chetan Sharma in the US announcing that smart phone sales have just crossed the 50% share mark in the US and that the US now accounts for one third of all smart phone sales in the world (as at lunch time Monday 9 May 2011). 7 The term smart phone has always been slightly awkward - is the phone smart or is it supposed to make us smart or at least feel smart and all phones are smart SO presumably we should have categories of smart, smarter and smartest phones. Over the last twenty five years the evolution of smartness expressed in terms of user functionality can be described as shown in Table 5.1. In the beginning, cellular phones were used mai