Having recently completed a 'feature phone vs smartphone' feature for PDA Essentials magazine, I was well aware of how far 'feature' phones have come, at least in terms of raw specifications. Mind you, I was still rather impressed by the quoted specs of LG's latest, the 'Secret KF750'.
Not only does it have a full-face touchscreen, it's also a slider, with a full keypad, AND it's only 12mm thick. But look at these selected bullet points from its spec list and keep in my mind the spec of your own smartphone (I've omitted spec items that are standard across most phones, such as frequency support, QVGA screen and internal flash memory):
- Constructed of carbon fibre and tempered glass
- Accelerometer for Auto Screen Rotation, plus an assortment of m-toy (motion sensing) games
- 5 megapixel camera, with up to 30 fps VGA and 120fps (for super slo-mo playback) QVGA video recording
- Media player with native DivX (640×480) playback
- Integrated Mobile Office Viewer
- Photo and Video editor suites
- TV-out functions
- Multitasking for built-in applications
Quite a list for a humble 'feature' phone, matching market leading smartphones like the Nokia N95. And, as my magazine article will explain, it begs the question: what's so smart about a smartphone?
In real life, having played with LG's very similar Viewty (shown below with the N95), I can testify 'quite a bit', but it's worth clarifying and exploring the differences in more detail, since this is a question (and answer) that's going to become more and more relevant as the year wears on.
- The Viewty (and presumably the Secret) have a very locked down interface, in terms of what goes where. If you're anything like me, you like fiddling with things to get them how you want them, in terms of application grouping and order of presentation. S60's particularly good at this, of course.
- S60's tagline has been 'Open to new features' for a while. I have to be honest, I thought this was a little underwhelming at first, but as we roll through 2008, I can see that being able to add extra native applications (i.e. ones which run efficiently, multitasking happily and which use all a device's hardware with ease) is perhaps the defining factor for what makes a smartphone 'smart'.
For example, being able to add in smooth Internet Radio, GPS-tagging of photos, a native full-resolution YouTube client, a desktop-synced password/PIN manager, a business-grade database system, a very fast 3D pool game, and so on. You'll have your own S60/smartphone favourites, no doubt.
Discovering and adding applications used to be fairly hard to do for new users, but with Download! improving and with N-Gage now coming on-stream, this is thankfully starting to change.
- Support for Wi-Fi. Now, doubtless this will start to creep into the feature phone world as well, in due course, but for now Wi-Fi is the province of the smartphone. And it's phenomenally useful. Whether streaming music or video, or perhaps browsing full desktop-grade web sites, or downloading and trying N-Gage games, having a fast and reliable Wi-Fi connection is something I've come to rely on. Yes, 3G/HSDPA data is improving, but it's still nowhere near as fast as my Wi-Fi and few people have genuinely unlimited data tariffs.
- Upgradeability. I'm sure feature phones can be firmware upgraded, but it's harder and they're far less likely to be. Users tend to stick to the firmware they get given at purchase time, bugs and all, and for some makes of phone the upgrade process is far from trivial. In contrast, the moment you plug your S60 (or UIQ) smartphone into your PC, there's at least some awareness of a 'check for updates' function that's available to you. For most devices, the process is still not trivial (although User Data Preservation - as seen on the N82 - is a big step forwards), but seeing your smartphone increase in performance and functionality over the course of your ownership is one of the joys of ownership.
Numbers 1 and 3 above can of course be added to feature phones in time, and possibly number 4, but number 2 really is the big one. Being open to new, native, fully-capable applications is what having a smartphone is all about. For example, it's why the Apple iPhone is about to make the transition from feature phone to smartphone, with native third party apps due to appear in a month or so's time.
And, in the meantime, it's why smartphones like the Nokia N95 (pictured) knock spots off the likes of LG's Viewty and Secret every single time.
Steve Litchfield, AllAboutSymbian, 27 April 2008
