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)
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I would say the defining feature of a smartphone would be the ability to install apps to expand its capabilities.
speaking of (not?) being able to install apps (Score:2)
What is the OS?
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It looks like it is the Series 40 OS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40 [wikipedia.org]
Re:What is the difference to the end user? (Score:5, Informative)
I would say the defining feature of a smartphone would be the ability to install apps to expand its capabilities.
You can do that on Series 40, installing Java ME apps has been possible for a long time now.
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My previous phone was Symbian. There's a world of difference between what Nokia were selling as an app platform with Qt/S60 native applications and Java ME.
Signed? (Score:2)
installing Java ME apps has been possible for a long time now
But can the apps do anything? I've read about Nokia phones on U.S. carriers that won't let unsigned Java ME apps connect to the Internet.
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Asha will not be sold in US beyond random imports. Too good of a phone for its price, and has dual sim models on top of it.
Re:What is the difference to the end user? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What is the difference to the end user? (Score:5, Informative)
Opera mini does the same, that is why it is so lightweight and can render (albeit sometimes incorrectly) fairly complex webpages on very weak phones, it even re-encode images to webp format to reduce file size. Amazon Silk also does that too, so it is nothing new.
Back to the topic, for the same price for a Asha 303, you could get something like a Samsung Galaxy Pocket, which has GPS and double amount of RAM. In my country (Vietnam, a 3rd world one) Android is gaining market, even at the lower end segment while Nokia is losing out rapidly. I was surprised that if someone I know has proper web-browsing capability now, then it is most likely to be an Android phone or, sigh, iPhone.
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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.
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Not "felt" but "is". Remember, symbian is an OS that runs native applications and is designed for mobile use from ground up. Android and iOS, no matter how you dress them, are still desktop OSs that got jury-rigged to work on resource-starved systems. Android even runs all its installed applications in a virtual machine to add insult to the injury.
It's pretty obvious that symbian will run better on weak systems. It's designed to, and it's probably one of the reasons it also won't scale well to a fast one.
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Look at OS cores, what they were based on. Understand the difference.
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
Re:What is the difference to the end user? (Score:5, Funny)
And I suppose every single app in Apple's app store is a shining jewel of quality and innovation?
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There were quite a few useful J2ME apps, actually. Google had a GMail app for a while that was very handy (and old packages can still be found if you look around, and they still work). Bombus for GTalk and XMPP in general. Games like Angband.
The biggest problem there by far was no ability to run apps in background. And I don't even mean early iOS-style restrictions when app suspends while in background, but rather quite literally - you could run one app that was in the foreground, and you could only switch
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I'm not talking about J2ME but native applications. I'm not completely sure how S40 is regards to this, but seems like the first S60 phone hit the US market in 2002.
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Well, at least traditionally, Nokia had two OSes. S40 was the lightweight one that only did java apps, for dumbphones (which is what the phones from the TFA happen to run). S60 was the hotrod with native apps and so on, multitasking, etc. The 'smartphone'... Perhaps the quintessential smartphone until iphone and android rolled around.
That's the angle they're working on, at least - that S40 isn't smart, because it wasn't smart. But 1GHz sounds pretty smart to me... just why the fuck not run S60 or maemo, th
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All good points, except there is really no reason why capable android phones can't come down in price enough to be competitive in that market.
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There is. OS itself. It requires a lot more hardware resources then S40.
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For under $100 I can get a LG Optimus with more ram, a slightly slower processor, but which runs native Android apps instead of J2ME so it's effectively significantly faster. I'm not locked into their carrier for apps and can run almost anything in the app store. I've owned both an S40 phone and an Optimus and I'll take the Optimus every time.
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The American idea is very simply.
There used to be dumb phones which made calls and did SMS; feature phones which had other cool stuff like camera apps, appointment books, music... and phones on 2G data plans like Blackberry, which was often called "Blackberry data". Any phone that also used Blackberry data was a smart phone.
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I don't know about that American idea. I don't personally consider the iPhone to be a smartphone unless it's been rooted.
A smartphone is one which provides capabilities for general computing, if needbe. That means apps and a way to install them, and "full control" (or close enough to it to get things done) of the device. File management/browsing, editing various files, and so on. Printing is highly advantageous. Email and web access does not cut it.
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Generally, I agree with you ("smartphone" for me means a programmable mobile phone) but these days, almost any device has some programmable ability (as the summary points out, these phones can run Java ME code).
A more modern definition of "smartphone" might include things like a sensor suite (camera isn't enough anymore, a GPS at least is expected), a powerful processor (which it has, at least powerful enough to easily qualify), a touchscreen, and some kind of "app store" even if it's almost nothing compare
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>A more modern definition of "smartphone" might include things like a sensor suite (camera isn't enough anymore, a GPS at least is expected), a powerful processor (which it has, at least powerful enough to easily qualify), a touchscreen, and some kind of "app store" even if it's almost nothing compared to what Apple and Google offer.
Would three out of four do it for you?
Sensor suite: Well it doesn't have GPS, but it does have an accelerometer. (Side note: Can an accelerometer make do as a poor mans' GPS
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Can an accelerometer make do as a poor mans' GPS by keeping track of all movements from the factory?
Even assuming that somehow the phone never lost power, accelerometers are nowhere near as precise as to keep a decent position over more than a few meters.
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Probably so. Still, it seemed like a neat geeky idea.
If somebody hacks it together, it'll be standard "Geek does X" Slashdot material.
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Not really. Inertial guidance is what military used to use before GPS. It sucks HARD even with extremely accurate military grade accelerometers.
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Extremely expensive and temperamental laser gyroscopes can maintain reasonable accuracy for about 30 minutes on a moving vehicle. The $0.05 accelerometer in your phone would be in bad sha
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...and on s40 you can extend more it's capabilities arguably than with windows phone 7.
so what's the beef?
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I doubt that most smart phone users even know there is an OS under their applications, to them any phone with a fairly robust feature set, good web browser and downloadable applications (from angry birds to bar code scanners) is a smart phone. There are probably a few other assumptions like a touchscreen interface and a highly customizable experience.
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OK, and who says S40 Java-based phones cannot install apps?
http://www.getjar.com/ [getjar.com]
Install all the J2ME apps you want.
If you want to install the apps from your phone, just go to m.getjar.com.
Or any one of a number of other places. Or Nokia's own appstore.
Any other so-called differences between "smart" phones and "feature" phones?
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Does that mean every old phone that came out with the ability to run JavaME apps were smartphones?
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To me a feature phone runs the phone stack and user applications on the same chip. A smart phone has a separate CPU for running user applications.
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so you can be locked into a data plan.
What's the difference? (Score:2)
Serious question not a troll, what is the difference between the 2 definitions? I honestly don't know.
Is it an API and third party applications for a smart phone versus locked-in phone feature in ROM for a feature phone? Or something else?
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And with feature phones, the apps you can install are typically gated by your carrier, whereas with smartphones, they are not.
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iPhone: Apps strictly gates by Apple
javaME: I can install any ME app I can find...
try again.
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ios, gated.
wp7, gated.
symbian, gated to a limit(signing).
android and s40, not gated..
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.
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Yes, but both "system" and non-system apps run in the same virtual machine, whereas in a feature phone, the dialer app, the camera app and a couple of pre-selected other apps will be written in the native language for the platform, typically some C, and be totally distinct from the junk you can dump into your java or bree or whatever environment.
As for JavaME, it allowed some pretty decent apps when enforced across all phone models in a market and provided with a single repository to buy/download apps. One
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> Yes, but both "system" and non-system apps run in the same virtual machine
Not always.
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it's not possible to install system(native code) apps on s40, so drop the probably.
j2me and webapps, that's it.
believe me, if it was possible to deploy c++ apps on s40 there would have been plenty of reason to target it with such apps(deployed in huge, huge numbers).
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Applications are definitively sandboxed on Android[...]
*including the Google apps*. The majority of the experience is provided by sandboxed apps. On android you can even replace a lot of the basic system functionality.
The distinction between feature phones and smartphones is largely a product of successful marketing.
Indeed, there is no need to fixate so much on it, but it's possible to make a distinction based on capabilities.
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And now say with a straight face that apps on android and iPhone aren't running sandboxed.
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Thank you! Finally a sensible definition.
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The serious answer has to do with price and how they co-market with carrier based plans. There is a natural continuum between dumb phones through feature phones through smart phones that is fuzzy. But for the postpay market there is not a continuum in pricing the phone has to target one market or the other.
Re:What's the difference? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Like the Communicators or the E-series business phones?
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So, can someone explain... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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what it used to be? it used to be c/c++ native code programs.
that's how it was untill windows phone 7 / iphone1(with webapps) anyhow.
nowadays it's just price. even nokia switches phones between feature and smart devices segments on their earnings reports on whim.
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In the beginning, the main difference between a feature phone and smart phone was that one was also a bad PDA.
Increased screen size, cameras, web browsing, mp3 players, and touch screens came later.
Nowadays, there's no firm line that separates feature phones and smart phones.
Generally the difference is price, which reflects on the features.
I still carry around a feature phone, but the US market has mostly abandoned it.
Your choices nowadays are almost entirely basic phones or smart phones.
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In an earlier post, I just said this:
A smartphone is one which provides capabilities for general computing, if needbe. That means apps and a way to install them, and "full control" (or close enough to it to get things done) of the device. The hardware needs to be flexible enough to move data on and off it. File management/browsing, editing various files, and so on. Printing is highly advantageous. Email and web access does not cut it.
I should note, I don't think many of the phones (including iPhone and Android) from major carriers are smartphones because their data plans are severely crippled, eg. wifi tether or using wifi itself will incur data usage. It all depends on the phone and the carrier. These phones very well might be 'smartphones', I don't know.
Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone? (Score:5, Funny)
(Just reading the headline and wildly assuming is fine, right?)
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.
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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.
That's only in the US.
You can get them on a plan here, but nobody does. They don't bring anything to the table except an odd kindergarten-corporate interface, and that's not a good enticement to waste money on.
Where does this bullshit keep coming from? (Score:2)
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
Err, what?
There are operator-subsidized offers for Lumia phones on both sides of the pond. You don't think Nokia earns only $50 on each Lumia 900 sold by AT&T, do you?
Operators seem to have no problem offering deals for iPhone and Android phones where Skype is available as an installable application, either.
and to this point they do not have enough features for people to want to buy them outright instead of on a plan.
You may need to look out beyond your geeky circle of friends. Maybe you'll see enough to stop making statements about people in general based on your limited experience. I remember people like you sa
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This isTomi Ahonen BS. There is no skype boycott. Verizon is actively looking to get an Windows Phone. Nokia doesn't make a CDMA+LTE phone, which is why Verizon doesn't carry them. There is no boycott.
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This is a Series 40 phone.
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I wouldn't say it is too cruel. There are many similarities between my lumia 800 and my old nokia 6600 (the small S40 slider one).
- I only use any of them to receive calls or sms with a SIM from countries where I used to live;
- 5MP, average camera
- dumbed down, but fast, interface
- some apps (including maps) but more expensive and less flexible than "smartphone" ones; also a lot less variety than Android or iOS;
- smaller resolution screens than the medium end smartphones, at their release
Differences:
"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]
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'It' might not have GPS, but other Series40 phones do/did :
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/?filter1=s40&filter2=gps [nokia.com]
SAAS - smart as a service (Score:5, Interesting)
What Nokia are doing is moving the 'smart' into the cloud. Seems smart enough to me. Not everyone wants a $600 phone...
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What makes the phone itself dumber, actually.
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Not quite. Vast majority of these androids are absolutely terrible. You're looking at extremely slow and unresponsive phone that has a battery that won't last you a day and build quality that won't last a year.
It's a cumulative effect of android simply not being designed to work well on extreme low end hardware combined with use of cheapest of the cheapest design decisions and materials not to mention assembly.
This just in (Score:5, Funny)
Needless to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Needless to say, these are outselling Lumia/Windows phones by a fat country mile.
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?
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1: Android sells on cheap phones.
2: Android sells on expensive phones.
3: Android makers profit.
1: Symbian sells on cheap phones.
2: Symbian does not sell on expensive phones.
3: Nokia profits.
1: iOS does not sell on cheap phones.
2: iOS sells on expensive phones.
3: Apple profits.
1: Windows doesn't sell on cheap phones.
2: Windows doesn't sell on expensive phones.
3: Microsoft does not profit.
2 out of 2 is good. 1 out of 2 is OK. 0 out of 2 is a fail. I think that's the point.
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Asha 305 w/ Nokia suite desktop == smartphone (Score:3)
I am surprised not to have read this is prior comments, but Nokia gives away a (primarily Windows) desktop software environment called Nokia Suite, of which the Asha 305 seems to be a full-featured client device. I mean c'mon, when you can enter contact info into your PC and everything (appointments, etc.) sync with your tiny phone, that's like a smart phone, isn't?
https://www.nokia.com/ph-en/support/product/305 [nokia.com]
https://www.nokia.com/global/support/nokia-pc-suite-specifications/?view=detail [nokia.com]
The latest Nokia Suite beta supports the Linux Nokia N9 too, (known only because I pay attention since I am pleased to own an N9).
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.
Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone (Score:4, Informative)
They're skimping on the RAM (128MB) by running S40. That and the small screen size shared with a hardware keyboard, whereas their S60 machines evolved to a larger touchscreen and slider keyboard.
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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.
Because S60 is a barely maintainable mountain of mostly crappy code? S40 is probably much easier to maintain and develop, because it did not have the "opportunity" to accrete frameworks upon frameworks of useless abstractions needed to work around somebody else's bad design.
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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.
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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"!
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That's the whole point. You can see it aplenty on Slashdot these days, too: people uncritically swallow bite-sized factoids if these are accompanied with a hearty dose of emotionally charged rhetoric and/or carefully doctored graphs that play to readers' sympathies. It's considered good form to get up and running with an idea suggested in the first half-sentence of the title, forget about the details buried in the summary. Don't worry about the moderators: they don't read it, either.
WTF is a 'Feature Phone' (Score:3)
And who gets to define what is and is not a Smart Phone; the consumers that's who, this is just iPhone fanbozi attempt to remain the cool kids on the block by denigration the competition.
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Sell, sell, sell... (Score:2)
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 inter
My take on Nokia's stock price increase (Score:2)
I remember some years ago when SCO kept getting slapped down in court and people still believed the shares had value. I was absolutely amazed at how long it took for the shares to bottom out. But the stock market is not rational and prices do not always reflect reality. I have read pro and con thoughts on Nokia. The pro people are carrying the day right now. Their argument is that Nokia is pursuing a winning strategy with Micro
Will never see basic phones with real features (Score:2)
JavaME? (Score:3)
So let me get his straight. Nokia first buys Trolltech for Qt, develops Meego, drops Symbian, drops Meego and Qt, try to sell Windows Phones, and is now rescued by JavaME?
If I were a shareholder I would be so pissed of right now.
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People pay $600-800 in alot of countries to get an iPhone, that doesn't even have a file browser. (Which this phone has)
People can look at the phone, play with the phone, pay if they think it's worthit to them, and if they pay then good for them. They've got themselves a shiny new phone that looks attractive. If they don't pay, then can merely find another phone.
There's no ISO definition of what a 'smartphone' is. Upgradable by applications? This phone has it. (J2ME). Touch screen? this phone has it too. So
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To me, it was key that the device does real multitasking (ie it works when the device is offline and no special programming is required). Not too many phone platforms qualify with that these days.