Abstract. The Heuristic Evaluation method has been popular with HCI experts for over 20 years. Yet, we believe that the set of heuristics defined by Nielsen in 1994 needs to be modified prior to the usability evaluation of smartphone applications. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of each of Nielsen's traditional heuristics to the usability evaluation of smartphone applications following an analysis of 105 peer-reviewed papers. It is anticipated that this work might benefit HCI practitioners, educators and researchers as they attempt to define usability heuristics for smartphone applications. This set of heuristics, once defined, could enable the discovery of usability issues early in the smartphone application development life cycle, while continuing to be a discount usability engineering method as originally defined by Nielsen.