Nokia Spinning Featurephones as Smartphones 210
zacharye writes with an excerpt from BGR: "One reason for Nokia's surprisingly strong share price rebound over the past two weeks is the success of its new Asha feature phones in Asia. According to our sources in Delhi, the Asha 305 sold out in several stores soon after its debut even before the marketing campaign kicked in. Is it a coincidence that major Asian newspapers like The Philippine Star and Singapore's The Sun Daily describe Nokia's new Asha models as 'smartphones'? No. Nokia has done its very best to dress up its cheap new feature phones as something far more aspirational — to the extent that devices like Asha 305 are now widely depicted as smartphones across Asia and Africa. This is a critically important maneuver.."
Of course, maybe they are smartphones; the Asha appears to be speced better than the HTC Dream (1Ghz processor, albeit with only 128M of RAM), and they've added a lot of new features to Series40. But then it's still Series40 with JavaME.
What is the difference to the end user? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the difference? (Score:1, Insightful)
Serious question not a troll, what is the difference between the 2 definitions? I honestly don't know.
Smart phones are more like general purpose computers, feature phones are just standard phones with a few non-standard features like web and email access.
But Nokia shouldn't have to worry, Apple has been passing off a feature phone as a smart phone for years now.
"Featurephones as Smartphones" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it. It seems these days smarta**es want "smartphone" to mean only something with ios, android, wp, etc. on it. It's not the OS that makes a smartphone "smart". Granted, it doesn't have a GPS receiver, but otherwise it's not a bad phone [1] for the price, and I wouldn't blame Nokia for marketing it with the goal of selling it - you know, that's the point.
[1] http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_asha_305-review-792.php [gsmarena.com]
Re:What is the difference to the end user? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of those reasons why I'm always annoyed by the generally American idea that "smartphone" == iPhone and later devices. Nokia has essentially been producing "smartphones" for ages before the iPhone; installilng third-party applications onto phones has been possible since, what, the year 2000?
The only thing the iPhone brought into the picture was the touchscreen and the centralized application store.
Re:What's the difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Applications are definitively sandboxed on Android and iOS too. It's probably possible to install non-java ME apps on these phones too, it's just that since the environments aren't standardized, no one bothers.
The distinction between feature phones and smartphones is largely a product of successful marketing. If Java ME hadn't been such a train wreck, we would just have viewed it as another smartphone platform, along with Android (which would probably have used it instead of Dalvik then), iOS and Blackberry's OS.
Re:Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone? (Score:5, Insightful)
At this point Windows phones are doomed no matter how good they are because the phone networks hate Microsoft with a passion. Microsoft now owns Skype which the networks see as robbing them of their birthright. Until that can be dealt with Windows phones will not be bundled with network deals and to this point they do not have enough features for people to want to buy them outright instead of on a plan.
Re:What is the difference to the end user? (Score:2, Insightful)
> The only thing the iPhone brought into the picture
Another major factor is that Apple is an American company. Compare with Samsung, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson.
Yes, I know about Motorola. So does Lara Croft.
Re:What is the difference to the end user? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of phone makers were making phones that had Java apps on them before the iPhone. Most of those apps were garbage, though, and seemed mainly designed to provide the carrier with more cash.
So when it comes to smartphones - maybe "smart" refers not to the phone, but to the phone's owner. As in, they were smart enough not to buy a phone filled with those crappy Java apps.
Needless to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Needless to say, these are outselling Lumia/Windows phones by a fat country mile.
Re:What is the difference to the end user? (Score:4, Insightful)
Us Asian all have small finger, that helps a bit with the typing, and there are some Android phones with qwerty keyboard too.
Regarding to speed, I agree that Symbian feels much faster, still I hate how they only includea minimal amount of RAM in their phone, my last phone (a Nokia 5230 with 128 Mb RAM, before I dropped it to death) could only open ~3 tabs with Opera Mobile before running out of memory. Nevertheless it was a good phone. But now Nokia has declared Symbian to be a burning ship, I see no reason to use it anymore. That, and with my personal hatred to Nokia for killing off Meego/Meltemi/Qt and then siding with Microsoft make that 5230 the last Nokia phone I buy.
Smartphone vs Feature phone (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is deeper down though, traditionally smartphones can run native applications to extend its capabilities. These applications will typically have full access to the entire device and treat it as a computer. Feature phones are limited to applications running in an environment such as Java, and they can only interact with the virtual machine that the environment presents. So typically feature phone applications are less capable than smartphone ones.. and on top of that Java, is a battery killer. Of course, some smartphones rely a LOT on Java applications too (such as BlackBerry devices) in addition to native applications.
One thing I can't understand though is why Nokia are even bothering with Series 40 at all when they could simply have used S60 (which is a proper smartphone OS) on these cheaper models. S60 is looking good at the moment.. just at the point it is being discontinued.
Hardly spin (Score:5, Insightful)
1Ghz CPU and 128 megs of ram is really quite a bit of computer power, lets get some perspective people. Just a little over a decade ago that would have described the computer in the steel case under your desk!
These things also support 3rd party apps and browse the web. The line between feature phone and smart phone is pretty blurred here if you ask me. Feature phone used to mean its got a camera, can do MMS, and a calendar app, possibly pac-man or brick out to play with. These are lots more than. I don't think its unfair to market them as smart phones, just not top shelf. Frankly if these are not smart phones Blackberry's aint either. The only way they are not smart phones is you think being a smart phone means running Droid or iOS.
What's a smartphone? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article has a lot of phrases like:
" widely depicted as smartphones"
"Nokia must mask its feature phones as smartphones"
"far from actually qualifying as smartphones"
"sheen of smartphoniness"
"trick the consumers into believing they are using a smartphone"
"Jurassic-era specs for Western smartphone fans"
"true smartphones"
"phony smartphone strategy"
But nowhere does it actually deign to define a "smartphone"!
Re:Needless to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Needless to say, these are outselling Lumia/Windows phones by a fat country mile.
Similarly, dirt-cheap Android phones outsell high-end Android models. Your point being?
Smartphone versus featurephone (Score:2, Insightful)
This might be buried since I am late, but here is a good definition for featurephone versus smartphone: http://laforge.gnumonks.org/papers/gsm_phone-anatomy-latest.pdf [gnumonks.org]
"A feature phone is a phone that runs the GSM protocol stack (the software implementing the GSM protocol) as well as the user interface and all applications on a single processor."
"A smartphone is a phone that has a dedicated processor for the GSM protocol stack, and another (potentially multi-core) general purpose processor for the user interface and applications."