The smartphone (or smart phone) combines telephone services with computer services in a single device. Though inventors and some manufacturers patented the idea and introduced prototypes 10 to 20 years earlier, the idea of mobile computer services caught the public attention with the roll out of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in the 1990s, with operating systems provided by Palm, Blackberry, or Microsoft. The Japanese telephone company NTT offered an HTML-oriented phone for general service in 1999. However, only with the release of Apple's iPhone in 2007 did the mass market for smartphones take off. Google published its open source Android operating system for mobile phones the next year. These two remain the dominant operating systems for smartphones, with the "app" or application as the cornerstone for their key features.- Individual users purchase the apps they wish in order to customize their phones.
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