Paul Hochman asks: Is a smartphone smart? (Hint: yes!)

Here’s the progression, as far as I can see it from here at CES, in Vegas: the first official smartphone was the Blackberry, which did more than make phone calls. Yes, it sent email. Not glamorous, but pretty nice. And hence the hunched, be-suited masses stooped over their palm-sized devices and swayed back and forth on the platform in Bronxville, waiting for the 7:03.

Then, some smart manufacturer put a camera in a cell phone. Suddenly the camera I mean phone began to groan. Its tiny little processor chip had to strain to move all of that content. Pictures, after all, take up tons of space.

So what did RIM (aka Blackberry) do? Nothing! At least, not right away. Who needs a camera when you’re squinting at a spreadsheet?

But with the advent of cameras in phones, and faster processors to handle them, came really fast chips; then really fast networks to move the video data that the newer, even faster chips could move. And, well, you get the picture: about 2 years later, we’re now walking around with the palm-sized equivalent of an amazingly fast computer.

Seriously. Consider Motorola’s new ATRIX phone and system. The smartphone has dual-core processors (faster than your average laptop, trust me), and 1 Gigabyte of RAM, meaning the chip doesn’t feel suffocated when it’s moving video. Oh, And forward-and-back facing cameras. And a security ‘swipe’ bar that lets you keep anybody who doesn’t have your fingerprints open your phone.

In other words, LOTS of stuff. How smart is it? Very.

But then he next step was adding processing power to cell phones. Andto