Smartphones have recently gained significant popularity in heavy mobile
processing while users are increasing their expectations toward rich computing
experience. However, resource limitations and current mobile computing
advancements hinder this vision. Therefore, resource-intensive application
execution remains a challenging task in mobile computing that necessitates
device augmentation. In this article, smartphone augmentation approaches are
reviewed and classified in two main groups, namely hardware and software.
Generating high-end hardware is a subset of hardware augmentation approaches,
whereas conserving local resource and reducing resource requirements approaches
are grouped under software augmentation methods. Our study advocates that
consreving smartphones' native resources, which is mainly done via task
offloading, is more appropriate for already-developed applications than new
ones, due to costly re-development process. Cloud computing has recently
obtained momentous ground as one of the major cornerstone technologies in
augmenting smartphones. We present sample execution model for intensive mobile
applications and devised taxonomy of augmentation approaches. For better
comprehension, the results of this study are summarized in a table
