When is a Smartphone no longer smart enough to be called a Smartphone?
I needed an extra phone and recently came into a BlackBerry World Edition phone, which will work for the service I had. I did not have a user manual so I had to scour the Net to find one. Navigating on it was not like any phone I ever used, it has a node that acts like a trackball. Once I found the model number and was able to find the manual, it was thin I discovered when the phone was introduced eight years ago it was called a Smartphone. I have had really basic and cheap phones that had more features, but they were newer phones. That got me thinking how many years do a Smartphone stay a Smartphone? When the technology filters down to inexpensive basic phones does that make a Smartphone, just a phone or is there still something in it to keep it being a Smartphone no matter how old it gets?
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This brings to mind the movie “Soldier”. But that personifies the phone a bit too much to compare that way.
I’m sure people will be using marketing terms like “smart” for ages. The phone itself might have been smart for its time and in years to come people may mock how primitive it is.
Over time I think it’s more of a label than anything. One that isn’t necessarily an adjective.
The idea of “smart” anything technological changes constantly. A few years from now we’ll laugh at what we currently consider even the most advanced smartphones and other electronic devices.
Blackberry has never made a smartphone. That is why they have had problems for the last eight years.
I got to turn in my blackberry at work Thursday, we finally have an app to get work email on an iPhone. My Blackberry was little more than a sophisticated pager.
Yes, there is a universal constant based on the phone’s microfraction of the nation’s GDP and the current NASDAQ index, that determines whether the marketing term Smartphone applies or not.
When it falls out of your pocket and into the outhouse.
When it accepts <insert deity here> as its personal lord and savior.
@zenvelo Blackberry has never made a smartphone.
That is what a lot of tech geeks who wrote articles on it before the launch called it. I still do not know what makes any phone a Smartphone as oppose to just a cell phone.
Blackberries and their clones were considered smartphones until the iPhone and it’s clones came about because it had the keyboard as opposed to just the numerical keypad, but it was still mostly a phone. This summer will be 8 years since the iPhone came out and the mobile revolution began – I think the misnomer is to call the touchscreen products of today ‘smartphones’ since they are used more for things other than phone calls, texts and emails.
^ So how is a SmartPhone smart other than having a touch screen? Even inexpensive phones have alarms, memo, voice calling, calculators and other crap some people will never get around to using.
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