I’m not quite sure how the Apple iPhone ended up on this list. While it’s lovely to see the progression of the various Palm OS, Pocket PC, and Blackberry models, can we agree once and for all that the iPhone is not meant to be a Smart Phone, or Smartphone, in the traditional sense? It is a Media Phone!
eWeek labs has this to say about the upcoming device:
The Future: Among the words Apple has used to described (sic) the forthcoming iPhone are “revolutionary,” “pioneering,” and “sophistication.” Some, however, have their doubts that the phone/media player/Internet device will, as Apple claims, “redefine what you can do on a mobile phone.” Only time will tell if the iPhone will be a giant leap for smart-phone-kind or merely an evolutionary oddity.
What exactly are the criteria for a “smart phone”? If it’s just that you can send and receive email from it, surf the web, download music, and manage your personal information…then wouldn’t that mean just about every phone available today is a smart phone?
Do you think that calling the iPhone a Smart Phone sets potential users up for disappointment?
Do you agree with this definition of a Smart Phone?
I’d love to hear your thoughts…
I’m going to call it the remote control…to my life. The Apple iPhone is more than a phone and it’s more than a media player, so the synergy of those two worlds combine makes it more than anything on the market today. With that being said, it won’t fit in any of the pre-defined categories such as smartphone or high end featured phones.
“What exactly are the criteria for a “smart phone”? If it’s just that you can send and receive email from it, surf the web, download music, and manage your personal information…then wouldn’t that mean just about every phone available today is a smart phone?”
I don’t know where you live, but “every phone available today” does not do all those things. In fact, most people do NOT want to do all those things and are perfectly happy with a $20 or free phone that sends and receives voice calls, period.
Why didn’t you go to some carrier’s website and see what phones are on offer before writing such a clueless paragraph?
@Vincent – Well then…we need to coin an as-yet unused phrase for it. Not “smart phone”, not “media phone”, and not “remote control” – because that makes me think of a totally different connotation…
@a little research? – how about the next time you quote me you include the “just about” portion of what I wrote, and don’t change my quote to fit your rant. I’m not sure where you live, but most of the phones on the T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, and Cingular US sites do have exactly the features I listed (or more) – whether the user decides to take advantage of them or not. In fact, anymore it is hard to find a mobile phone that is just a phone. :eyeroll:
Sigh…
Let’s take Cingular, for instance, with the link you have so kindly provided. There are only 14 phones, in the PDA/smartphone category, which do everything you mentioned in your paragraph. The majority do not. My definition of a smartphone is that it does ALL of those things. I will concede you some form of “managing your personal information”, no matter how lame it might be, on most phones, but I still don’t see how you get to “just about every phone” downloading music, surfing the web and sending and receiving email. It’s not even true that “just about every phone” does ONE thing out of that list. I invite you to comb through Cingular’s full product list of 80 phones to see for yourself.
I have a crummy Nokia phone right now, and although I suppose it’s technically designed to browse web sites I’m sure I don’t even want to see what a hash it makes of them with its puny, hard to read screen.
I’d consider a smartphone to be a phone that has a focus on these functions. That is, it’s meant to /usably/ read mail, surf the web, etc.
This means that it has a large display by phone standards, and some method to make typing text reasonably easy. So the T-Mobile Sidekick is a smartphone, as well as the Treo, Blackberry and Windows Media devices.
It’s generally bigger than ordinary phones to accomodate the sizable display and keyboard (or combined display and keyboard, as with the iPhone).
Phones like the Samsung Blackjack are in my book only marginally smartphones because of the tiny display. I don’t think there’s any usable way to browse the web or write email on that phone.
Based on this definition, the iPhone is the best smartphone yet, because only it has put work into improving the usability of web browsing, which for me is the killer app on any smartphone.
Truthfully, the only third party program I’ve put on my sidekick is SSH. I hope the iPhone has SSH but other than that I’m not too worried about third party stuff at all.
I do think it will be loads of fun to develop widgets for the phone and maybe even some web sites scaled for the device if its browser is detected. The widgets can be served off the web so there’s not even any need to be able to install third party software on the phone itself; you’ll be able to develop widgets or something very similar without any problems.
D
**sigh, is right**
Okay “a little research”, evidently you like to argue ridiculous points. But I’m game, so let’s get going.
I will break my paragraph down into little sentences so that maybe you can grasp what I was asking…or not.
My original statement:
“What exactly are the criteria for a “smart phone”? If it’s just that you can send and receive email from it, surf the web, download music, and manage your personal information…then wouldn’t that mean just about every phone available today is a smart phone?”
Taking it sentence by sentence:
1. “What exactly are the criteria for a “smart phone”?
That is a question for YOU to answer. It may be a different answer depending upon the person answering. This is what they call a rhetorical question. There may or may not be a correct answer. Got it?
2. “If it’s just that you can send and receive email from it, surf the web, download music, and manage your personal information…then wouldn’t that mean just about every phone available today is a smart phone?”
That was another rhetorical question, listing properties that might make up a person’s definition of a smart phone. It doesn’t mean that every phone has each and every property.
You chose to make everything literal, when these were rhetorical questions.
I do love that I got you talking, tho. ;-)
But finally, in the end, you answered my question with your response: “My definition of a smartphone is that it does ALL of those things.”
Which, bravo! About damn time.
@David – thank you for answering the question, you get a gold star. We don’t have to agree on the answer, I am just glad that you saw (and understood) the questions.
Hi
I posted on a similar topic at my blog a little while ago.
Rather than re-write what I said there, for me it boils down to the ability to easily use all of these functions. Without a doubt the iPhone is a smartphone – it’s just the smartest phone.
Anthony
http://www.iphonemojo.com
A rhetorical question presumes that the facts in the question are not in dispute, and/or that the question does not need to be seriously debated. As demonstrated, the facts in your question are in dispute, and you do want a debate. Sorry I presumed the question was, if rhetorical, dumb. No need to curse at me!
I guess it’s ok to debate how one would personally like to define a smartphone, but there is in fact a common, industry-standard definition, and that’s a device that *combines* a phone with standard PDA features, email and Web browsing. Treo and BlackBerry are the standard-bearers. Music downloading and a camera are actually not a part of this industry-standard definition. So a phone that has a camera and/or downloads music but doesn’t have full PDA features, email and Web is *not* a smartphone. I think the Cingular site bears me out on that.
So, no, “just about every phone available today” is not a smartphone, based on industry self-definitions and the features of most phones available.
It is a convergent device. A device that brings together various functions that in the past (sometimes a distant past) were separate. Phone. Music/media player. Email. PIM. Web browser. Camera.
TQuila, it is very much a convergent device. :-)