Human intelligence has a long and illustrious history. From Greek philosophers to geek programmers, being called a "smart" person is, and always has been, a weighty commendation.

With such high inherent value placed on intelligence, bestowing telecommunications devices with the personified moniker "smartphones" means those devices better be pretty revolutionary — and boy, are they ever.

After being introduced in the late 1990s, smartphones have come to define the way individual people connect to the rest of the world. The top five manufacturers shipped nearly half a billion devices around the world in 2011 alone. About half of the mobile phones used in the U.S. are "smart," and that percentage is growing rapidly, according to Nielsen data released in March.

Smartphones have come a long way in a short time. Improvements in technical specifications such as internal processors, battery life, storage capability, screen size and broadband connectivity optimize the way devices perform.

While the future for smartphones looks promising, let's take a look at how we got to this point in time.

The History of Smartphones

1946: AT&T Establishes the First Mobile Network

Without a wireless network, there would not be wireless phones. Long before the Verizon guys were traveling the globe asking "Can you hear me now?" the American Telephone and Telegraph Company set up the first wireless network. On June 17, 1946, a truck driver placed the first wireless telephone call.



1974: Theodore George Paraskevakos Patents the Basic Smartphone Concept

Years ahead of his time, Paraskevakos filed the paperwork to the U.S. Patent Office in 1972 for an "apparatus for generating and transmitting digital information." Paraskevakos was born in Athens, Greece, but became a citizen of the U.S. His company, based in Delaware, was ultimately granted the patent in May 1974.

1994: IBM Combines a Cellphone and PDA Forming the Simon Personal Communicator

This ancestor of the modern smartphone was capable of text messaging, faxing and emailing, in addition to making phone calls. The device retailed for $1,099, or $899 if the buyer signed up for a two-year service contract (some things never change).

1999: The Smartphone Market Begins to Bear Fruit With the BlackBerry Email Device

At $399, the initial BlackBerry device was certainly more affordable than the Simon Personal Communicator. The only problem was the first BlackBerry was only a two-way pager with email capabilities, not a phone. It wasn't until 2003 that a BlackBerry smartphone hit the market.

2000: Ericsson Uses the Magic Word When Marketing Its R380

Give Ericsson credit for marketing prowess. The Swedish company called its R380 mobile phone a "smartphone," a term that has certainly caught on in the marketplace. The device was a lightweight flip phone that ran the Symbian operating system. Symbian was the dominant smartphone operating system until Android surpassed it in 2011.

2007: Apple's Multi-Touch Screen iPhone Brings Smartphone Design to New Heights

It was kind of like an iPod, except you could use it to make phone calls, take pictures and browse the Internet. Apple was not exactly a pioneering smartphone company. The iPhone was released years after the first smartphone, and despite Apple's claim, it wasn't the first company to have a multi-touch screen. By combining the features, however, Apple created a smartphone that offered more than just a way to communicate with other people. The iPhone was literally a mobile media center. Updated versions of the iPhone have become progressively more sophisticated, and fanfare for the product seems to increase with each release. Apple introduced the most recent incarnation of the device, the iPhone 5, at a ballyhooed press event on Sept. 12.

2008: Google Blows Up the Smartphone Market With Its Android Operating System

Android phones hit the market in October 2008, and it quickly became the dominant mobile operating system. There were more Android devices sold than Apple and Symbian combined in 2010. Although Android and Apple's iOS are rivals, there is not actually one "Android phone," but rather a multitude of models across several companies that make Android-based phones. Today, there are more than 500 million active Android devices, which is about one for every 14 people on the planet. Hopefully they're not all as paranoid as this little guy:

2010: The Smartphone Market Catches a Virus

Smartphones have become so integrated that people are pushing all kinds of highly personal information through the devices, such as email passwords and bank account information. This is exactly the type of information cyber criminals want to steal. Not to mention, with people freely and frequently installing third-party software onto their smartphones, there is significant potential for security problems. Kaspersky Lab, a mobile-security software developer, identified what it said was the first Trojan virus for Android devices in 2010. Keeping your phone's operating system up to date should help protect against these mobile monsters.

The Future of Smartphones

Security concerns aside, the ability to support third-party software will be the driving force behind smartphone performance going forward. Third-party software refers to the features we tenderly refer to as "apps."

With apps, smartphones' capabilities are not limited to the ideas of the programmers at the companies that manufacture the hardware — such as Apple or Samsung. Anyone with an idea can create a smartphone app. Many of these simple yet subtly life-changing apps, such as Instagram and Shazam, have even been incorporated into our vernacular and used as verbs, just like Google.

In its four year existence, the Apple App Store already boasts 700,000 mobile apps with downloads totaling more than 25 billion. Google Play hosts 600,000 apps and sees 1.5 billion app downloads every month.

With motivated startups driving the mobile app development industry, the only restriction on smartphone capabilities is the limit of human imagination and, of course, current hardware. In other words, if there isn't yet "an app for that," there probably will be one soon.

Images courtesy of Sjcramer and Bcos47, via Wikimedia Commons