9781422272930

the outside world. These devices were mobile phones and personal data assistants (PDAs). Since cell phones were only equipped to handle phone calls, other tasks such as instant messaging, emailing, and keeping track of a calendar were all completed on a person’s PDA. Computer science created the opportunity to merge these two devices together, thus creating smartphones. The microprocessor is a piece of technology behind how smartphones process and display information. These tiny chips operate as the “brain” of your smartphone, taking commands such as a tap on the touch screen and translating it into an action. This is the process that is responsible for allowing you to open apps, navigate around webpages, and play games. The people in charge of developing this technology are called computer scientists. Even though their name suggests that they might deal mostly in laptops or desktop computers, that’s not actually the case. In reality, smartphones are actually powerful computers, and in most cases, they even share the same technology as their traditional computer counterparts. Like computers, smartphones depend on an operating system and a user interface to work properly. One common occurrence for any modern-day smartphone is a software update. This update consists of a code that is written by computer scientists, which essentially contains instructions that tell the smartphone to perform programmed tasks in new, updated ways. These software patches also might include supplemental coding that fixes minor bugs in the programming or helps the phone to operate more quickly when users access the internet or navigate between tasks on their smartphones. Computer scientists are responsible for formatting the technology that takes this coding and translates it into a language that a smartphone can understand.

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SCIENCE IN SMARTPHONES

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