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En español | Buying a new smartphone can be overwhelming.

Not only can the jargon make your head spin — megapixels, SIM cards, terabytes — but we all have different needs, personal preferences and budgets. Perhaps you've seen phones advertised specifically for older adults, often with bigger buttons, a louder ringer, or larger display. Is this something you should consider?

It's not a one-size-fits-all scenario. Because you're likely to be with this device a lot and for a few years, choosing the right phone is critical.

A smartphone is essentially a pocket-size internet-connected computer, along with a camera and camcorder, digital wallet, gaming system, health and fitness monitor, music player, navigation tool and much more.

(By the way, a megapixel is one million pixels, and camera phones are often measured this way, so a 12-megapixel camera can create images with 12 million megapixels. A SIM card, which stands for subscriber identity module card, is the chip inside your phone that stores your cellphone user information. And a terabyte, about 1 trillion bytes, is a way to measure data storage; 1,000 bytes is a kilobyte, 1 million bytes is a megabyte and 1 billion bytes is a gigabyte.)