Nokia Spinning Featurephones as Smartphones

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[JMonty42]

I would say the defining feature of a smartphone would be the ability to install apps to expand its capabilities.

So, can someone explain...

[cupantae]

What's the difference between a feature phone and smartphone? For someone who uses strong words such as "trick" and "phony" about this, he certainly doesn't make the distinction clear.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[starworks5]

With that logic, you couldn't have any strongly secured android or IOS phones! Smart phones are about having multiple uses, as opposed to several features, or just being able to make a phonecall.

Here is an excerpt from nokia in the TFA

James from Nokia here. One thing this piece overlooks is the web-browsing tech that comes as standard on our Asha models, including the Asha 305 mentioned here. Every time you access FB or Twitter or whatever else, the webpages are rendered in the cloud to keep data traffic very small and browsing fast. This of course does wonders for your phone bill (the Nokia Browser uses up to 85% less data than a competitor’s phone) and tells a little bit more about our strategy with Asha: making the Internet more accessible for people.

I would consider this as being smart, especially given the region and infrastructure available there.

SAAS - smart as a service

[twl]

What Nokia are doing is moving the 'smart' into the cloud. Seems smart enough to me. Not everyone wants a $600 phone...

Re:What's the difference?

[JaredOfEuropa]

That's one important difference between smart phones and feature phones that Nokia never seemed to understand: a smart phone is a pocket computer (call it an "organiser") which happens to have the ability to make calls too. A feature phone is a phone that has some extra apps bolted on. From a design perspective that is an important distinction, and it's the reason why so many Nokia smart phones sucked from a usability point of view, even though they had a decent hardware design.

As for the iPhone, I don't see why it shouldn't be classed as a smart phone, even though it's more locked down. A friend who enjoyed using an iPhone for some years before making the switch to Android joked: "The advantage of Android is that you can customize the whole phone to your liking, including the desktop, the keyboard, etc. The disadvantage is that you have to". Apple locks down the UI, but that default UI has proven to work well for many people. If it doesn't for you, get a 'Droid.