Reader's question:
It seems that as all phones get smarter and smarter, the term "smartphone" is a bit misleading and/or misused. I was in a carrier store recently, and it seemed like every phone has a QWERTY keypad, camera, calendar, web, and email capabilities. What's the difference between cell phones and smartphones these days anyway? Jeff S.
Editor's answer:
That's a very good and interesting question. From a corporate perspective, a smartphone should for instance support remote management and offer several layers of security options in order to be regarded as a phone worthy of the "smartphone" label, hence the existence of BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones. That way, thousands of "work phones" can easily be managed from a centralized solution. In many cases, these phones are also running at maximum security, meaning that a large part of the smart features have been disabled. In other words, the corporate owners of the phones will regard these phones as the smartest out there, while the corporate users may easily find them to be anything but smart.
However, from a consumer or individual business perspective, which we primarily focus on here at infoSync, it's without a doubt getting harder to distinguish between cell phones and smartphones. AT&T's Nokia Surge for instance, is a cell phone powered by a smartphone OS, while the same carrier's Apple iPhone is a smartphone that in many cases are powered by a proprietary cell phone OS. For both, there are developer tools that let developers create third-party applications to enhance the given phone. However, while Nokia will let you make the Surge smarter than most smartphones if possible, Apple will not allow you to make the iPhone significantly smarter without violating your contract terms.
In our opinion, the term "smartphone" will soon end up like terms such as "Handheld", "PDA" and "Palm Pilot", now mainly used to talk about products of the past. The terms "cell phone" and "mobile phone", on the other hand, will remain as the most useful words to describe a mobile device with calling capabilities, regardless of technology used. The word "smart" is simply too relative to have any value for categorization of mobile devices in the future.
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