Windows Mobile-based Smartphones (Cont.)

The Smartphone combines telephony features with the functionality of a PDA in a compact wireless telephone that can be operated with one hand.

Functions include voice, SMS, and Instant Messaging services; email that can be received from sources such as the Outlook messaging and collaboration client, Exchange, IMAP, and POP3 services; and Personal Information Management (PIM) applications such as calendar and contacts.

The Smartphone architecture provides a core set of services that will abstract a variety of underlying links for both voice and data services. The primary Smartphone architecture consists of four layers:
  1. Applications/UI: The top level refers to the Smartphone shell and customer-level applications such as Pocket Internet Explorer, the Inbox, the control panel, and the phone dialer.

  2. Logic: This level contains system application logic that can be used by the application layer. Examples of this include the control of network connections and synchronization capabilities.

  3. Core APIs: This level provides the interfaces between the low-level architecture components and the application/logic layers. By developing applications targeted at this layer and the one above, developers do not need to know the underlying low level details in order to take full advantage of their capabilities.

  4. Radio Stack: The bottom level refers, in general, to the architectural components responsible for voice and data control and data transmission.