There Will Be No Such Thing As A “SMARTPHONE”

That’s a harsh conclusion, I couldn’t agree more. But this conclusion is the result of my observation during my trip to several cities around the island, and it’s good to see how technology adopted in areas outside of the big cities.

You can see everyone’s using the so-called “smartphones” in big cities like Jakarta, Bandung and Jogjakarta and the rest of the smaller cities surrounding it are filled with the so-called “feature phones”. The smartphone category is filled with iPhone, Samsung/LG/Sony Ericsson Android-based phones and high-end Nokia while the feature phone category consists Nexian, Skybee, Huawei and other cheap devices.

So I tried really hard to make a sense of this separation, and I find it to be very shallow.

The current definition of smartphones according to Wikipedia : “… a high-end mobile phone. A smartphone combines the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone. Today’s models typically also serve as portable media players and camera phones with high-resolution touchscreens, web browsers that can access and properly display standard web pages rather than only mobile-optimized sites, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi and mobile broadband access.”

While feature phone defined as : ” … is mobile phone that, like smartphones, combines the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone. Today’s models typically also serve as portable media players and camera phones with touchscreen, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi and mobile broadband access. Feature phones is the term generally used to describe low-end devices, with smartphone used to describe high-end devices, though there is no official definition to distinguish the two categories.The term originally referred to mobile phones with more features than other contemporary “dumb” mobile phones”

Nowadays, the distinction between a smartphone and a feature phone is very vague. A smartphone like iPhone or Android can have features WIFI, Bluetooth, third-party apps, cameras, GPS, social networking apps etc. What about feature phones? Guess what, they have exactly the same features as smartphone! Only in a much cheaper (and most likely weaker) hardware.

Smartphones could cost you hundreds of dollars, most of them are more than $200 while most feature-phones are cheaper than $150. Is this a fair distinction for smartphones and feature phones? Of course not. That would be the differentiation between low-end and high-end phones, not smart vs feature phones.

The differentiation wouldn’t be on the features or software, but mainly going to be on the hardware. Since the 70s, people see the future in software and slowly leaving hardware development as the potentially high-margin business, but there’s a possibility that hardware is back on trend.

In the future, I think the thin line between smartphones and feature phones will slowly disappear. There will be no such thing as a smartphone. There will be just .. phones.

And Blackberries.