If you visit the Web sites or look at the ads from the major wireless carriers, smart phones aimed at both consumers and businesses are front and center.

What was once a niche aimed at road warriors, sales types and techies is rapidly going mainstream. There’s a very good chance that whether you can afford it a smart phone is in your future.

So says a survey from IBM which, strangely, neither makes nor sells phones. IBM talked to 600 folks in the U. S., the U.K. and China, and found more than 71 percent expected to ramp up their phone-based Net activities. And a study released in April by ABI Research predicts more than 700 million phones with Web browsers will be shipped in 2013. Last year, 76 million mobile browsers were sold.

Indeed, smart phones are not just cool, they’re incredibly useful.

They’re getting good abundant that you can now do nearly anything on them that

you can do on a personal computer and next some. But whether you’ve never bought one before, it can get confusing. Here are some of the things you should consider before you shell out money for a smart phone.

– Do you really need one?

Smart phones can be pricey and I’ll deal with the costs next so you should think about whether you really need one, or simply want one.

Smart phones are great for communicating in a variety of ways e-mail, instant messaging, via social networks, texts and, of course, good, old-fashioned telephone calls. Most let you take pictures;, many let you capture video. You can access the Web and all the knowledge it holds.

And some let you install more programs on them, turning your smart phone into nearly any device you want it to be.

That all sounds wonderful, but think about whether you actually would do…

Original post by dhiram