Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

The title hints at the tough time the industry has to define what a smartphone is. I've already given up on that, as there's a huge gray area of phones that have so called Open OS's yet are still not mechanically designed for messaging and information management, and vice versa, and then there are Nokia's 'multimedia computers' etc etc.

Therefor I like the design of the Helio Ocean, as it kind of says 'screw terminology, let's make something useful'.

Little Springs Design has two recent articles about this, but I can't safely say they make the picture any clearer.

segmenting handheld devices

The Carry Principle revisited

And here's a contribution from MEX, muddling the concept even further:

Serving the data creators

Phrases like 'smartphones' and 'featurephones' are just ways to make something undescribable pseudo-describable/understandable and easy to refer to. Compare with:

• MP3 Players that also support AAC, FLAC etc, somehow they are still MP3 Players, why?
• DVD Players that also support DivX, XviD, VCD, CD, MP3 etc, -"-

The problem with mobile phones is that 'smartphones' and 'featurephones' don't describe any tangibly different use cases anymore. A DVD Player is still mainly used for playing DVDs, so that phrase is still fairly accurate. A mobile phone is mainly used for making voice calls and sending SMSs, whatever it's called, yet sports tons of other features. The most appropriate term is probably 'mobile everything'. Oh whatever...