Word is that 500 million Chinese connect to the Internet with their cell phones. What about you? Are you one of the late adopters? Do cell phones confuse you? Since cell phones/mobile devices are really mini-computers, we felt it was time to explain a few things about these tiny but powerful devices. Here are some tips and explanations for you.

1. Smart phone – Remember when cell phones used to be, well, just cell phones? If your cell phone just makes phone calls, you’re pretty much behind the times. Even if you can send SMS (text messages), you’re still in the Dark Ages as far as cell phones go. Smart phones are like cell phones on steroids. No, they aren’t bigger but they are much more akin to mini-computers than they are to plain old cell phones. Many people, including some of those 500 million Chinese, use their smart phones instead of computers. Yes, they are that powerful. You wouldn’t want to write a novel on one but you could certainly whip off a pretty long email using the touch screen keypad or the attached thumb keyboard that some models have.

2. Mobile OS (operating systems) – just as your computer has an operating system, be it Windows or OS X or even Linux, smart phones use an OS, too. If you have heard the word Android,  and who hasn’t, that’s an operating system. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone owns an Apple smart phone/device. Android is the most popular mobile OS, iOS (the Apply one) is second. In order to control all of the ‘apps’ that are available now, the OS has to be powerful and dependable. Some of RIM’s problems, RIM is the Canadian company Research in Motion, stemmed from a failure of it’s servers/OS. People remember things like that and, since many of us are addicted to our phones, a loss of service is unbearable.

3. Apps, what the heck are they? – No doubt you’ve heard of Angry Birds. That’s an app. Lost in a new city and need to find a restaurant/bar/hotel? There’s an app for that. For just about anything you can think of, and even more that you can’t, there are apps that provide information and fun and others that extend your creativeness. Have you heard the word ‘Instagram’? That was originally an app. It uses the camera that is in virtually every smart phone or mobile device and adjusts the photo qualities to make the picture more interesting. There are hundreds of thousands of apps at this point in time and more every day. From star-gazing to maps to free text and telephony, there are most certainly apps for that.

4. Social Networking – Besides email and texting, smart phones are also perfectly capable of connecting to any social network you can think of, everything from Facebook to Twitter to Weibo and Weixin.  While it’s a bit more difficult to browse a photo album from your phone, at least you can do it while you’re on the bus or waiting for a movie to start. You can also tweet about the food in the restaurant you’re dining at, too. Poor service? Tweet about it. Word gets around quickly these days.

5. I bet they’re hard to use – While smartphones are more powerful than your plain old cell phone, they aren’t necessarily harder to use. The whole point of these gadgets is to make them available to the masses. If they were extremely complicated to use, who would want to get one? Actually, many of these phones are actually easier to use than the old ones. Developers have thought long and hard about how to get these units into the hands of consumers and then get them to stay there. No wonder the Blackberry phones are often called Crackberrys. Their users depend on them for a huge part of their social life.

6. I bet they’re expensive – While smartphones can be every expensive, if you check around and keep an eye on the ads (watch the fine print from the major players), we’re sure you’ll find one that fits your budget. Right now in Canada, mainly because hundreds of thousands of students are returning to school, you can get a brand new smartphone for less than $200 and a monthly plan that is less than $30.00 a month, complete with unlimited text,data and local voice calls. That’s less than getting a landline (your old-fashioned home phone) and Internet the old way. These smartphones, such as the one pictured below, have beautiful mega-pixel cameras, video capture as well as large screens (4.5 inches or more) to watch movies or TV shows on. With the unlimited data plan, you can watch streaming video anywhere you happen to be…as long as you are in the unlimited zone. (See the small print for details on that.) Here’s a shot of the Huawei Ascend P1s. It’s under $200.

Cheap prices, cheap monthly bills and all kinds of features…what’s stopping you?

Thanks for reading!