The digital age in which we live today is witnessing technological development and an information revolution in various fields. This technological development has been imposed on education and it has become important to recognise adaptive e-learning systems as one of the most interesting research areas in online distance education. This area of research allows developers to build a distinct learning environment that meets the needs of each learner separately, in order to adapt learning to their needs and characteristics. This paper aims to give an overview of state-of-the-art adaptive and intelligent e-learning systems by describing their features and architecture, as well as the actual implementations. the authors also highlight some prospects for future work by reviewing, discussing and analysing existing systems. In addition, the authors propose an overall architecture with the system components that will be used to run our mobile application.