Back in the late 90's when Symbian had just been formed, the term Smartphone had not been coined - indeed if we transport ourselves back in time to the first iteration of the Symbian.com homepage we see references to "Wireless Information Devices" - or WIDs as they were known within the Symbian team.
In an excellent piece of marketing Symbian were able to work with analysts and define the category in a way that distinguished the devices from traditional phones - and as Nokia were working on releasing phones with their platform were able to claim early market share ownerships of 80%+ very fast - in spite of the fact that the share of the global phone market was in single digit percentages.
There is no clear definition of smartphone but in industry terms it normally includes the following features
- Runs an "advanced OS"
- Offers "advanced features"
There are counter examples - people generally accept that RIM devices are "smartphones" in spite of the fact that these devices have a Java runtime on top of an RTOS - identical to many "featurephone" devices.
Other devices that have native application development support (e.g. BREW) are considered to be "feature phones"
So the term is no longer particularly useful - and I'd like to offer a new definition in a world of Application Stores.
"Smartphones" are phones that have a platform that is updated with new features and APIs after release.
This breaks the cycle of "feature update means phone hardware update". Apple have achieved this with iPhone. Support for OS updates is significant as it allows application developers to take advantage of new OS features as they are released, and allows vendors to release updates for phone features such as browsers, browser plugins to keep the device current with the latest internet standards.
As a simple rule of thumb - any device that has not had a SW update for over 12 months should no longer be considered a "smartphone"
Thus people looking for "smartphone" devices should look at- iPhone
- Android
The traditional smartphone platforms are no longer smartphones
- S60 (Nokia have a record of not upgrading old devices with new features)
- Windows Mobile (Few devices are regularly updated)
- RIM (again old devices don't contain new OS releases)
The biggest advantage here is for app developers - as their costs in testing/maintaining/releasing new apps is reduced as they can reasonably expect that users will have a "modern" OS release.
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