As science and technology develops fast, a simply mobile phone that  could only send short messages and make phone calls is not enough,  people are pursuing a mobile phone that can not only communicate with  other but as a way of entertainment, so smartphones appear as the  outcome. What is the definition of smartphone?  A  smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing  ability and connectivity than a contemporary basic feature phone.  As plenty of manufacturers who produce smartphones, there are a lot of  models for us, what are the factors that we notice when we choose a  smartphone?       1.     Appearance. The  first thing you may notice is the appearance. Color, contour, bar phone  or candybar phone, touch-screen or keypads, or both. You won’t buy an  ugly phone, so the manufactures never stop designing their mobile phone  with distinctive appearance. But it seems that when one manufacture  designs a pretty façade, others would copy it, just another brand, so  with similar appearance, what you should do is compare their other  aspects.   2.    Brand.  Different brands have their own advantages. For example, Nokia is  famous for its quality, if your Nokia mobile falls down by carelessness,  there hardly has effect on it unless it meets with really a heavy fall.  Sony Ericssion has very pretty appearance and iPhone is fashionable.  There are five well-known smartphone brands and their main models, they  are: Nokia (N97, E72, C5, X6, N95, 6700S…)/BlackBerry (9650, 9630,  8700…)/Motorola (ME600, CILQ, Droid, A1200, V8…)/Apple (iPhone,  iPhone3GS, iPhone 4)/HTC (HTC Hero, HTC HD2, HTC Desire…) 3. Battery Life.  We are used to the basic use of a mobile phones and their battery power  maintaining for a long time, nobody wants to charge batteries  frequently; this not only causes troubles in charging but damages the  battery. But when we get a smartphone, besides the normal use, we would  use it to surf the Internet, play mobile games, connect Wi-Fi or use  Bluetooth. These functions may consume your battery fast. Especially the  3G smartphones, they demand high-capacity battery, maybe in the future,  external portable power sources will be the standard configuration to  solve this problem. 4. Functions. Besides  the traditional use of making phone calls and sending SMS (short  messages) or MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), a smartphone also has  the following extra functions: GPS, Bluetooth, Multi-media, Wi-Fi,  Camera, Network or other functions, as we use more application programs  for other applies, compatibility to the applications is very important.  Frankly speaking, some of the functions are not useful in our daily  life; on the contrary, they may expend the battery power, so my advice  is that choose the right one but not the functional one.