Is using a smartphone for hacking reality or a thing of science fiction?

It is possible, a phone is just a handheld computer after all, but you'd probably have to "hack" the phone before using it to hack other things.

Computer operating systems are built for doing many things. Some come with more "bumper pads" than others, so that a less-tech savvy user doesn't hurt themselves navigating a world wide network. This isn't a bug, it's a feature.

For example, visiting the darker recesses of the Internet is something not to be taken lightly even by professionals, early experimenters often accidentally took down large parts of the Internet, and many governments now have laws that will fine you or even lock you up if you start stomping all over their radio spectrum. Power comes with responsibility.

The fact is that most computer users today have very little idea how all this technology works, and how it has to all work together so that their Facebook status is transmitted accurately, securely, and almost immediately across many networks and systems, and across national boundaries.

Hackers often find ways to get technology to operate in unplanned ways. To do this, you need a device that isn't going to say, "you asked for 10,000 network open requests, you probably only meant to only send one" or "you requested a special character in a URL, you probably want me to encode it for you."

For people who know what they're doing, this is unacceptable. When you tell a computer to do something, you want it to do precisely what you tell it to.

Mobile devices are some of the most tech-neophyte-friendly computing devices on the planet. To hack from a mobile device, anything but the most rudimentary web mapping exercise would be difficult to impossible using the included software.

However, there are ways to reload the device with software that is more conducive to hacking. It isn't pretty, but it gets the job done.

That... and I'd have to have a physical keyboard. Touchscreen hacking, unless you know the exact environment and have everything scripted and set up beforehand, is painfully slow.