Every Phone Is Smart
Once every radio used transistors, we stopped saying Transistor Radio. Once every TV had a color screen, we stopped saying Color TV. And now that every phone is smart, we can stop saying smartphone. In fact the sooner we stop, the better, since unlike transistor radio and color TV, the term smartphone confuses everybody.
‘Smartphone’ started off meaning a phone that could do something – anything – beyond making a phone call and sending a text message. The Nokia 9000 Communicator and the pdQ were freakishly smart, but Sprint called the NeoPoint NP1000 (left) a smartphone because it had a WAP browser and its black and white screen was larger than normal. That set the bar pretty low.
It is ten years since these phones came to market, and today almost every new phone in the world has a built-in camera, a color screen, an HTML browser, a calendar and address book that you can sync with your desktop, and can download a wide range of games and applications. Every phone is smart.
But surely some phones are smarter than others? This is where it starts to get confusing. One phone may be more powerful or capable than another, but it could be on any of a dozen different measures: my phone may have a 3.2 MP camera, but yours may be better for instant messaging.
A lot of people think that a smartphone is a phone that can receive email. But thanks to applications like Flurry, I can send and receive email on any Java phone. Other people say that smartphones are phones with qwerty keyboards; but that rules out the Nokia N95, the HTC Touch, and almost every phone in China or Japan, while letting the Sidekick in.
The research firm Gartner says that a smartphone must be voice-centric. They insist on classifying most Blackberry devices as PDAs, which explains why Gartner is the only research firm in the world to claim that the PDA market is still growing in the US.
Many people in the industry define a smartphone as a phone with an open operating system such as Symbian or Windows Mobile. But this also rules out the Blackberry, along with the iPhone and the LG Prada. Whether phones have open operating systems or not may matter to us, but so does a single-core architecture. Most customers couldn’t care less.
Read this side-by-side review of a Nokia 5700 and a Nokia 5300 from the delightfully obsessive-compulsive folks at AllAboutSymbian and explain to me how one is smarter than the other. True, one of them has better support for music and video, but that doesn’t make it smarter – it makes it more fun.
I’m confused. So is everyone else in the industry. So how are customers supposed to know what’s going on?
I say drop the term smartphone altogether, and let’s accept the fact that there is no simple replacement. The market has grown complex and diverse, and we need a richer taxonomy.
Nokia says that some phones are for the enterprise, some are not, and some phones are not phones at all, they are multimedia computers. Michael Mace argues that some devices are information-centric, some entertainment-centric, and some communication-centric, which makes a lot more sense. Sony Ericsson recognizes that some entertainment-centric devices are camera-centric, some music-centric, and some TV-centric, and brands them accordingly (Cybershot, Walkman, and now Bravia).
But every carriage is horseless. And every phone is smart.
“explain to me how one is smarter than the other. ”
It’s very simple actually.
A smartphone (such as S60) can run many pieces of third party software all at once, and you can switch between them whenever you want, just like on a PC.
A non-smart phone (such as Series 40) can’t do this, it can only run one third party app at a time.
Of course that might not fit your definition of “smart”, but that’s technically what the name “smartphone” means.
But I agree “smartphone” is a very vague and deceptive term, a much better name would be “multitasking phone”. The problem is it’s just not as catchy as “smartphone”.
And actually… Nokia HAS already dropped the term smartphone for models aimed at the mainstream market. The 5700 smartphone I wrote about in the article is never advertised as a smartphone, it’s always referred to as a “music phone” or simply “phone”. Very few Nokia smartphones actually have the word “smartphone” anywhere in the publicity or tech specs any more.
As I said in the article, if smartphone makers can sort out the problem of battery life (which is by far the biggest weakness of modern smartphones), it seems very likely that smartphones will finally merge completely with normal phones, and everyone will own a multi-tasking gadget just called a “phone”.
krisse,
I’ve been in the industry for 8 years and have never heard that definition of a smartphone before. Perhaps I need to read AllAboutSymbian more often
My point is that there is no consistent definition of the term and therefore it is useless. Proposing another definition doesn’t change that, unless everyone agrees to adopt it.
Thanks for the comment.
i am into developing apps, graphics and goodies for the smartphones(esp. NGage). i have a community of 3000 members, where i release my products for free usage.
though there isn’t a proper definition for a smartphone. a general perception says that a smartphone is a smartphone if it can do a major part of what a pc (or a palmtop) does for u.
but if it lacks a standard os upon which third party application run, it cant b called a smartphone. series 40 phones run on java tech., apps developed on which dont have that much freedom over the system…
[...] we started Vindigo in 1999, a smartphone was the Neopoint 1000. In 2000 I bought the first phone in the world with a color screen, the Sony Ericsson T68. There [...]