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.

Comments

What is the difference to the end user?

[siddesu]

As long as the features the phones provide to the users are comparable, who cares what virtual machine runs the software?

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 is the difference to the end user?

[cbhacking]

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 compared to what Apple and Google offer.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[gl4ss]

...and on s40 you can extend more it's capabilities arguably than with windows phone 7.

so what's the beef?

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Clarious]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[loranger]

The smarter the phone is, the more power it need to perform the same function.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that typical J2ME implementations are seriously crippled, resulting in crippled software. It wouldn't really have to be so but it's been delibarate policy or certain manufacturers for a number of years so that they could promote their "smartphones" instead.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Isaac-1]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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?

[93 Escort Wagon]

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?

[ChunderDownunder]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Clarious]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[mirix]

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, then? Because Elop hates anything better than windows phone? Wonder if they've added some multitasking and/or native apps to S40, if that's even possible without the thing being a completely different OS.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick someone alert the phone naming standards committee, then we can send the police after these marketing execs!

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

And I suppose every single app in Apple's app store is a shining jewel of quality and innovation?

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[shutdown -p now]

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 to another app (or make a call etc) by exiting that foreground app - no task switcher or anything like that, and no push of course. That rather limits their usefulness.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Compaqt]

OK, and who says S40 Java-based phones cannot install apps?

http://www.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?

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[biodata]

AFAIR these were the first smart phones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[CptPicard]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Karlt1]

Does that mean every old phone that came out with the ability to run JavaME apps were smartphones?

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Compaqt]

>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 by keeping track of all movements from the factory?)

Powerful processor: 1Ghz processor

Touchscreen: Though less resolution than others at 240x400. 3" screen.

Appstore: Getjar.com, Ovi.com, and wherever else you want to get apps from.

Also these smart features not available in iPhones:
Use whatever carrier you want.
Use your hardware without getting permission from Cupertino or Mountain View.
Open file system, load whatever you want.
Install whatever app you want, from wherever.
Dual SIMs (multiple phone numbers, one for work, one for play)
Expandable storage.
Dual camera (not on original iPhone)
FM Radio (not on original iPhone, I believe)
Huge talktime
Replaceable battery (I believe)

By the way, the original iPhone did not feature apps (programs that run your phone). It only had "webapps". By that measure, this is definitely a smartphone.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

But 1GHz sounds pretty smart to me... just why the fuck not run S60 or maemo, then? Because Elop hates anything better than windows phone?

Because he's a smart guy who can see a lucrative niche.

The Nokia Asha phones sell for under 100 (EUR or even USD). What kind of smartphone would you get for that kind of money? A crappy one.

But there are still plenty of people around who like what an Asha is about:
* Cheap. Phones get dropped, stolen, wear down. But we're talking less than a hundred bucks so it's ok.
* Several days of battery life. Having to recharge your phone at least once a day sucks.
* Physical QWERTY keyboard.
* 3[.5]G and WiFi so you're covered either way when you need to connect.
* Cloud-rendering, one-page-at-a-time, simplified browsers is all they need.
* No need for multitasking. Some people only look to their phone for simple things and they do them one at a time. Mostly they talk on them. Occasionally they look something up on the net, send a message, or play a simple game to pass a couple of minutes. That's it.

Granted, the smartphone offers a while different level of capabilities. But there are still people that don't feel they need that.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Appstore: Getjar.com, Ovi.com, and wherever else you want to get apps from.

IMHO this one is the deal-breaker for calling it a smartphone. Apps are an integeral part of a smartphone and must be easily accessible.
getjar.com etc. are a pain in the backside, to put it kindly. You need to know and select your device on your own, you need to install things manually, ...

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[icebraining]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[zome]

I would say smartphones are ones that need to recharge daily.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[aurispector]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, good think that Apple's 90% is highly poslished instead of crap like flashlights and fart apps. Yup, most of those Java apps were garbage and most of smartphone apps are great. Right.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Compaqt]

Probably so. Still, it seemed like a neat geeky idea.

If somebody hacks it together, it'll be standard "Geek does X" Slashdot material.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[arose]

My current "featurephone" happily runs J2ME apps in the background, the switching is a touch clunky, but it works ok for switching between Google Maps (really well done app BTW), Opera Mini and the phone itself. Dunno how recent of a thing that is though.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[jbolden]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[lindi]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Joe_Dragon]

so you can be locked into a data plan.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing the iPhone brought into the picture was the touchscreen and the centralized application store.

Suck my Nokia 7710, bitches!

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

> This is one of those reasons why I'm always annoyed by the generally American idea that "smartphone" == iPhone

Only if you re-define smarphones as phones that can't make phone calls.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 2nd job at Walmart and I've noticed that there is a large portion of the population that care about one feature only: the price. The phone that we sells the most units by far is a 14.88 prepaid flip phone.
Since people are people, I would expect that to be true in India and Brazil also.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[afidel]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a $40 flip phone that I can install apps/games on and browse the web. Is it a smart phone?

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

My $50 GPS-less Huawei U5719 (or some combination thereof) is still capable of using Google Maps with location accurate to about 40 meters, done via cell tower triangulation. No extra hardware is required, and should be accurate enough for travel directions (it is on my phone!)

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Luckyo]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Luckyo]

There is. OS itself. It requires a lot more hardware resources then S40.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Luckyo]

Not really. Inertial guidance is what military used to use before GPS. It sucks HARD even with extremely accurate military grade accelerometers.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[jandrese]

There is another bandwidth saving feature on that phone, phone browsers that take that approach are almost always terribly crappy and people stop using them as much as possible, saving on their monthly bill.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[jandrese]

What? What Desktop OSes were Android and iOS derived from? MacOS has been slowly converging on iOS for years now and Google had no previous OS before Android. It is fair to say that Symbian was designed for weaker phones, but that's largely a matter of what design compromises it made like having a crappy web browser that falls over when you try to visit half of the websites out there.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Luckyo]

Look at OS cores, what they were based on. Understand the difference.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[CAIMLAS]

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.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

"OS cores"? You mean iOS, which is modified Mach microkernel, and Linux, which is succesfully used in tons of embedded devices with severely limited resources (among those are a bunch of other phones, like Motorola ROKR, Meego/Maemo etc.)?

What's your point?

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[jandrese]

I think the problem is that Blackberry and Apple redefined what it means to be a "smartphone". Back in the day if you could run some sort of hobbled web browser and maybe some highly constrained apps you were a smartphone, but then phones with full browsers appeared that didn't have tons of arbitrary limits on their applications and finally had enough power to do interesting things. When you look back at the old days of app development, everybody talked endlessly about how hard it was to cram what they wanted to do in the 200k install limit on those platforms. They were also terribly slow due to the multiple layers of abstraction on top of relatively modest hardware. John Carmack had a comment about it:

The biggest problem is that Java is really slow. On a pure cpu / memory / display / communications level, most modern cell phones should be considerably better gaming platforms than a Game Boy Advanced. With Java, on most phones you are left with about the CPU power of an original 4.77 mhz IBM PC, and lousy control over everything.

Remember that this post was 6 years ago, back in the early days of "smartphones", so don't get your panties in a twist about the "modern cell phone" comment.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[jandrese]

You can use accelerometers as a form of dead reckoning, but the problem is that errors are compounded over time, and depending on the quality of the sensor those error bars become ridiculously large in fairly short order. After a day or two it wouldn't even be able to tell you if you were still somewhere on the Earth.

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 shape after a few seconds, a minute at most.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[mcgrew]

I guess my Motorola feature phone is a smartphone, then, even though it was only $100 without a contract. It does email and web pages, you can install apps. Actually it's a bit like a blackberry with its qwerty keyboard. But it runs neither HTC, Android, nor iOS but instad runs some crappy Motorola OS.

BTW, Google, keep the Motorola engineers, they make fantastic radios, but lay their programmers off. Those guys suck.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they brought neither the touchscreen or the app store, both were available in earlier phones (Nokia had an app store, mostly used in europe though)

Apple did bring everything together with a bit of polish (But it still had lots of rough edges), and then released it to the US market, to whom it was a revelation after phone stagnation by greedy carriers. Apple's real legacy with the iPhone, was to deal with AT&T, which was the thin wedge to improving the market for phones in the US.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Beat The Odds]

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.

No, I've seen a few and that's definitely NOT it.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[dmacleod808]

I bought a Samsung Replenish pre-paid phone to use as an mp3 player when my ipod died (the replenish was 60 dollars at target) It runs android 2.3.6 on a 600mhz proc and does my media needs just fine, even video tolerably. Yeah maybe it was a 'crappy' smartphone, but it was only 60 dollars,.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

SE feature phones did that back when iPhone got launched. Sure, the "app" suspended while in the background, but it could be done.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

To Android/Dalvik, 256Mb of RAM is tight.
To S40/Java, 128Mb of RAM is unimaginably huge.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

Carmack is an idiot.

Now that you've modded me troll, let me explain. At that point, we had highly capable smartphones, without need for Java, 200k limits, whatever. Heck, my E62 (which is a tuned-down version of the E61, with half the RAM and a much slower CPU; and the E61 itself wasn't one of the top Nokias of the time) could EMULATE a GBA! I'm not talking about demos, BTW: I replayed the whole remake of Final Fantasy 6 (III in the US) in my phone. It had a bigish screen (2.8'), good resolution for the time (320x240), and a full QWERTY keyboard, making the idea of "lousy control" even more ridiculous. If you give up on the QWERTY, you had phones that could emulate a Genesis back in 2003 (the 6600, or the dreaded N-Gage); maybe even a SNES, if you could take low framerates. Symbian apps could be a lot of things, but they were never "highly constrained" in functionality.

Carmack was thinking not of smartphones, but of crap like the original RAZR. That was an awful phone. Java-only, almost no space, terrible OS, the worst UI i've ever seen in my life. It only sold because of its form factor, and (this is a big point IMHO) because the real good phones of the time didn't sell in the US. No US carrier wanted phones with WiFi, or phones where you could download apps, ringtones, wallpapers, etc without going through their own "store" and paying a lung, an eye, your soul and left ball for a single ringtone. Since you can't buy phones without going through the carriers in the US, you could only buy the crap they offered (yeah, you could pay full price for a phone on some carriers, but let's face it: nobody did that).

What Blackberry offered was better phones, a real way to stay connected, and a way to get applications without going through the carriers. What Apple offered was a user-friendly version of the same, and a touch UI. Those two companies didn't redefine what it meant to be a "smartphone". They brought to the US the idea that phones have manufacturers that aren't Verizon/Sprint/AT&T/T-Mobile/etc. They managed to break the stronghold of the carriers, and show people that your phones could do more than what the carriers were letting you do with them; an idea that the rest of the world already had for years.

Note: I'm not even from a highly developed market. I'm from South America. Six years ago, when I first went to the US, I took my phone with me. I was amazed at how the US market was under-developed. The Americans I talked to were amazed at how good my phone was.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[biodata]

So when you are talking about hobbled web browsers and highly constrained apps 'back in the day' you mean like iOS today?

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? What Desktop OSes were Android and iOS derived from? MacOS has been slowly converging on iOS for years now and Google had no previous OS before Android. It is fair to say that Symbian was designed for weaker phones, but that's largely a matter of what design compromises it made like having a crappy web browser that falls over when you try to visit half of the websites out there.

Do you know nothing? iOS (based on Mac OS X) is BSD UNIX. Android is a derivative of Linux (a UNIX-alike). Since both are (basically) POSIX-compliant UNIX-based systems both are based desktop OSes. And, even better, UNIX was originally designed for 1970s computers that had less memory than Symbian phones.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the cores they are based on, I would argue that they are server OSes, rather than desktop OSes :)

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[KZigurs]

Yeah. One was capable, documented and predictable. The other one was Symbian.

Before I'm downmodded into oblivion - I was/am a commercial mobile software developer since 2003.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[KZigurs]

Approx. 2002 actually. This is when the J2ME runtime was finalized well enough to be stable and usable.

Fun trivia fact. First J2ME capable phone was Siemens SL45i. Sexy little beast. Look it up, you'll be envious.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[KZigurs]

Approx. 2006. SonyEricsson sorted this out in their JP6 engine (by JP7 it was smooth).

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[KZigurs]

Define a difference between J2ME and 'native' application. Motorola V3 (all shit around 2005-2007) and the platform used on most of the Motorola phones at that time was J2ME. Which lead to some interesting findings like having well written J2ME applications beating the FPS of native interface 3x.

Android is not native as well. Doesn't hold it back much. iOS is arguably native, but still within a sandbox.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[KZigurs]

This. This shouldn't be at 0 (where it is now).

Forget the blackberry (it was, and still is, a one trick pony), but the point about original RAZR fucking up the rest of the industry while the capabilities were already there holds absolutely true.

I'll go one step further and say that Carmack (and I remember his rant back in ... 2006?) is indeed an idiot. The CPU was never a limitation, it was always around the memory bandwidth. Once you were working in nice pre-allocated byte arrays as a fixed bounds state machine (absolutely okay for anything game related) you were flying...

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[KZigurs]

BTW, Google, keep the Motorola engineers, they make fantastic radios, but lay their programmers off. Those guys suck.

Somebody yet again summarises the essence of Motorola. This statement has been true for last 10 years.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

So when it comes to smartphones - maybe "smart" refers not to the phone, but to the phone's owner.

Sorry, they are called smartphones, not douchephones.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android even runs all its installed applications in a virtual machine to add insult to the injury.

You can write apps in pretty much whatever language you want. Although C seems to be best for libraries where speed is important.

Having apps in a sandboxed vm seems to be a good idea as far as android is concerned with its piss poor app security model. don't get me wrong, I like and use android, but I prefer Maemo on my Nokia N900. Which btw is the first and last real smartphone. Full control over everything over ssh. I can log gps data, make phone calls and sms over ssh. That's a real phone!

I wish Nokia stuck with Maemo instead of getting sidetracked with Meego and released models on todays hardware with Maemo. I believe the open source community would have taken it to the sky. Development is still in progress albeit slow today. With todays hw I envision a Maemo 6 that can sideload android apps if need be, but why? 99% of all the cr"apps" are stupid web front ends and other useless trinkets and gadgets whose sole purpose is to bombard you with adds.

Idonno.... The maemo repositories are loaded with great REAL apps, some buggy yes.. some just made to scratch an itch. But at least you have much more choice in language and front ends. Gtk, check. QT, yep. Ncurses... yep...

I just can't believe Nokia can just turn their back on the N900. Probably the only phone that could have saved them. And no, the N9 doesn't impress.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Luckyo]

N950 was the successor of N900. Essentially N9 with keyboard making it actually usable as a workhorse a la N900 rather then a tricked out pony that was N9.

I blame "image over usefulness" trend more then any individual company, through you could argue that apple is largely to blame for the trend.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I think you are talking about their kernels. Which were both fairly flexible robust kernels ( linux and Mach) that have always been high performers. Those really are strengths of IOS and Android.

It can really work both ways, looking at historical versions of operating systems. Symbian was really EPOC 32 which was was run on this thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_5. If that doesn't really look like a modern device capable of multimedia and high performance, well that's because it isn't. IN many ways upscaling an operating system designed for minimal specs is more difficult as devices tend to increase their cpu, graphics, sound, memory, and battery capability, rather than the other way around. Palm tried to do the same thing and bascially failed with their OS 5. Black berry pretty much failed to update its system and essentially restarted with QNX as a base. Nokia pretty much looked at symbian and saw the same thing: its not capable of competing with what users are expecting from modern portable devices.

Re:What is the difference to the end user?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Did you really just reference Moto RoKR? That's like a cursed/banned word over at Motorola. That phone more than any other is the device that inspired the iphone. Steve Jobs was so pissed off at Motorola's implimentation of a music phone that connected to itunes, that he put the ipad on ice and launched the iphone project.

What's the difference?

[mister2au]

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?

Re:What's the difference?

[mjwx]

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.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's definitely not the API and apps. The iPhone was considered a smartphone even before it could use apps, and many featurephones allow app installation. I'd say the main difference is marketing and price.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything with a 3MP camera or more is a Smartphone, for carriers marketing at least.

Re:What's the difference?

[siddesu]

With feature phones, you run end-user apps in a manner that is different from the "system" end-user applications, typically in some sandbox. For smartphones, you are using the same environment for both. This usually implies a different development environment and language.

Re:What's the difference?

[dgatwood]

And with feature phones, the apps you can install are typically gated by your carrier, whereas with smartphones, they are not.

Re:What's the difference?

[Vintermann]

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:What's the difference?

[bickerdyke]

And now say with a straight face that apps on android and iPhone aren't running sandboxed.

Re:What's the difference?

[bickerdyke]

iPhone: Apps strictly gates by Apple
javaME: I can install any ME app I can find...

try again.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

And with feature phones, the apps you can install are typically gated by your carrier, whereas with smartphones, they are not.

According to that criterion, the iPhone is a feature phone.

Re:What's the difference?

[siddesu]

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 example of such a service was the Docomo i-appli marketplace.

So, technically there are some differences (which were in place back then because hardware wasn't powerful enough for general purpose computing), but from the user perspective it is mostly marketing and management.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay... so that means there /isn't/ any difference to the typical end-user then?

Re:What's the difference?

[gl4ss]

ios, gated.
wp7, gated.
symbian, gated to a limit(signing).

android and s40, not gated..

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is 'smartphone' means the computer-like phones that led the industry and impressed your friends.

Except the cheap phones have caught up. A 'featurephone' is a 'smartphone' that didn't cost as much as yours so you need a way to make it sound inferior. It also helps inhouse and outhouse PR departments fill column inches.

Outhouse PR department: aka "technical" "'journalists".

Re:What's the difference?

[dwater]

> Yes, but both "system" and non-system apps run in the same virtual machine

Not always.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apple has been passing off a feature phone as a smart phone for years now."

Indeed. When the original iPhone showed up it had less features than a slightly aged SE flip phone.

Yet the press called it a smartphone, apparently because it had that touch screen.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on where in the world one live. Aiming a featurephone browser at getjar.com or apps.opera.com may produce interesting results.

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.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Genuine Apple iPhones here in China are extremely expensive, And by that I mean they cost even more than they do in the US without any kind of price adjustment for the typical cost of living. Consequently there's tons of room for local competition. Personally, I've got an extremely basic Nokia phone which I couldn't find an equivalent in the US. It has basically no features other than what could be done via firmware, I think the flashlight is the only gimmick on the phone. But it gets like a week between charges and has never caused me any trouble.

Re:What's the difference?

[fa2k]

Thank you! Finally a sensible definition.

Re:What's the difference?

[CptPicard]

Like the Communicators or the E-series business phones?

Re:What's the difference?

[JaredOfEuropa]

I've used a Communicator 9110 and played around with an E90 for a bit. Both, but the 9110 in particular, suffer from the same problem: they are designed as phones instead of pocket computers with a GSM chip.

Re:What's the difference?

[gl4ss]

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).

Re:What's the difference?

[fa2k]

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.

Re:What's the difference?

[jbolden]

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?

[squiggleslash]

I refuse to believe you've used a Nokia 9110.

The 9110 (pretty much all 9xxx prior to the 9300 at any rate) is a computer with a friggin' GSM phone bolted on to the front. Pretty much literally. A 21xx series phone on the front (changed to a 61xx series in later models), with the microphone and speaker routed to the back, with a separate pocket computer - complete with keyboard - on the back. Early models ran a version of GEOS over an MS DOS clone on a low power 80386, later models ran an EPOC (that's Psion's system, from their clamshell pocket computers) derivative.

I cannot possibly see how you can claim these were "designed as phones". Sure, the phone bit was originally designed as a phone, but the computer bit is more computery than what you'd find in an iPhone. Literally in the case of the 9000.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

The defaut i UI works okay for many people; they do no know that there's anything better because they cannot change it. Even my hardcore i Friend consolidates all of his applications to two screens because he is adverse to scrolling through 11 pages of stuff to find what he wants.

If that friend bought an HTC Sense phone with a quick pinch-zoom to see most / all of his home screens (or enabled the "theming" engine, switching profiles between "work" and "play" and whatnot, this would reduce the number of pages even further since not all applications / icons would need to be present in both (a movie locator, for example, would not need to be available on the work profile)

The "The advantage of Android is that you can customize the whole phone to your liking" isn't true for all Android devices, that's the thing. Samsung includes Swype without any user intervention -- arguably one of the best keyboards out there. HTC introduced the "pinch for homescreen jump" mentioned above.

Stock Android has been lacking a little bit, but it focused on basic OS features first, rather than make a snazzy UI. The best part is, it didn't matter for those with stock UI because the entire underlying OS is designed to accept replacements gracefully, which means others are able to work on it seperately while Google focuses on features that require OS support (USB Host and Flash, for example)

Re:What's the difference?

[jandrese]

And a full feature web browser. People forget just how terrible your average cell phone browser was back then and how much of a killer feature Safari was on the iPhone.

Re:What's the difference?

[jandrese]

The difference with iOS is that you're not stuck running in a VM. It uses a more jail-like concept to sandbox the app, which is much lighter weight than running a full VM. The result is that apps on the iPhone tend to run a lot faster than similar apps on other platforms, and is why Apple has been slower than Android and Symbian builders to improve the specs of its phones.

Re:What's the difference?

[inglorion_on_the_net]

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.

I'm going to disagree with you here. One of the reasons Nokia phones have historically been so popular in Europe is that their usability was GREAT, whereas many of their competitors sucked. Especially the early smartphones running Microsoft OSes.

I haven't used the new Windows-based Nokia phones, but all my favorite phones before that have always been Nokia phones, whereas all the non-Nokia phones I've ever owned have always been disappointing.

Re:What's the difference?

[KZigurs]

To be honest on occasions the browser was horrible due to the operator trying to 'make it better' for you. I still want to find whoever made the 'optimizing' proxy for Vodafone (UK) in 2007 and do horrible things to their kids, family, pets and property.

*(kidding. I've forgotten the company name now, it was a proxy solution. It was absolutely horrendous though)

Re:What's the difference?

[KZigurs]

*tip of a hat to one old-timer to other*.

Communicators were fecking brilliant, especially as in the early days of GSM you had to do a ISDN simulated modem session whenever you needed a connection. Packet data/GPRS came fair few years later. 9210 (the pinnacle in my view) was a masterpiece. EPOC/Psion level of usability and ease. It even had a as_you_type filtering of the contact book! (unheard of at the time) and proper telnet clients (SSH wasn't a big thing yet then).

speaking of (not?) being able to install apps

[reiisi]

What is the OS?

Re:speaking of (not?) being able to install apps

[grouchomarxist]

It looks like it is the Series 40 OS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40

Re:speaking of (not?) being able to install apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Asha's on the forty-five. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimful_of_Asha. Unless that's only by the brimful ...

Re:speaking of (not?) being able to install apps

[Anonymous Coward]

But Series40 has had application store for ages.

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:So, can someone explain...

[gl4ss]

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.

Re:So, can someone explain...

[TubeSteak]

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.

Re:So, can someone explain...

[CAIMLAS]

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.

Re:So, can someone explain...

[CAIMLAS]

Even the 'basic phones' in the US are more-or-less smartphones.

I mean, shit. You can get a Pantech Marauder with Android 4.0 from Verizon 'for free' with a 2 year contract. In these parts, the 'free phones' define the very bottom of what's available.Look at the specs on that thing - it's very similar in spec to something like an HTC Sensation or any other ~1 year old latest-greatest phone. Assuming getting root on the phone is possible (it is), there's really not any reason to get anything other than a smartphone (short of preference).

Re:So, can someone explain...

[jandrese]

I would argue that there never was a firm line between the two.

The main difference to me seemed to be which plan the carrier offered for the phone. Unlimited Data? Smartphone. Per-byte charges for data? Featurephone. Of course Unlimited data is gone, but Smartphone users still can't be opted to be charged per byte (and they wouldn't want to, Featurephone data charges were outrageous). Featurephones often had other restrictions aimed at making more money for the phone company, like not being allowed to install ringtones unless they came from the company store (at hilariously marked up prices), and extra charges for MMS, etc...

Re:So, can someone explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

WP7 at least lets you use the hardware pretty extensively in their managed environment (allowing for 3D games and such), and the iPhone started allowing native apps... what, a year after the iPhone came out? Less?

I think the main issue is just that Java ME is an enormous mess. So maybe "smart phone" is "a device where it's practical to develop, download, and use custom programs.

Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone?

[RanCossack]

That's too cruel, really.

(Just reading the headline and wildly assuming is fine, right?)

Re:Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone?

[dbIII]

It's not a Windows phone. You can tell because people are buying them.
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:Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone?

[grouchomarxist]

This is a Series 40 phone.

Re:Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone?

[ozmanjusri]

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.

Re:Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone?

[jbernardo]

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:

- the old 6600 was actually fun to use, the lumia I am always fighting the artificial restraints;

- expandable memory on the 6600 slide, with standard uSD cards

- touch screen on the lumia, also much larger and higher resolution than the 6600 slide

- keyboard on the 6600 slide

- "social media integration" on the lumia - I never used it much, I rather use the facebook/linkedin/twitter clients or go to the sites directly;

So, what makes the lumia a smartphone instead of a featurephone, like the S40 ones?

Re:Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone?

[jbolden]

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.

Re:Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone?

[thexile]

why u get a lumia in the first place? just curious.

"Featurephones as Smartphones"

[l3v1]

"Featurephones as Smartphones"

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

Re:"Featurephones as Smartphones"

[dwater]

'It' might not have GPS, but other Series40 phones do/did :

http://www.developer.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/?filter1=s40&filter2=gps

Re:"Featurephones as Smartphones"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. It seems these days smarta**es want "smartphone" to mean only something with ios, android, wp, etc. on it.

They're not smarta**es, they're feature a**es.

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:SAAS - smart as a service

[bickerdyke]

What makes the phone itself dumber, actually.

Re:SAAS - smart as a service

[Anonymous Coward]

There are dirt cheap Android phones that happen to be slightly cheaper than these Ashas. And smarter (yes, I own such an Android device).

These Ashas are being bought only thanks to marketing tricks and what's left of Nokia brand loyalty. But they have no future, Android is already invading their territory.

Re:SAAS - smart as a service

[Luckyo]

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.

Re:SAAS - smart as a service

[CAIMLAS]

Yeah, except most of the carriers are now offering what -was- a $600 phone just a year ago, as a "free" phone. See: Pantech Marauder from Verizon (a carrier notorious for overcharging).

This just in

[wonkey_monkey]

Company uses vague buzzwords to engage in nefarious tactic known as "marketing".

For the love of god...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just take the N900 design, make the processor faster. Add a bit more RAM and fix that bloody usb connector and then sell it as a featurephone spun as a smartphone.
You'll still be a fucked company, but at least you'll have the best goddamn phone on the market.

(From a geek point of view).

cheaters?

[Anonymous Coward]

they are tricking people eager to get a status symbol phone into believing that this is a real smartphone. they should be sanctioned for this.

Re:cheaters?

[FishTankX]

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 I find it somewhat wrong to bash them for calling it a smartphone.

Re:cheaters?

[dwater]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The Sun Daily belongs to Malaysia, not Singapore!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sun Daily belongs to Malaysia, not Singapore!! .my domain belongs to Malaysia, .sg domain belongs to Singapore.

Malaysia is the neighbour country of Singapore. As all neighbours do, we hurl insults at each other from time to time.... hate to be lump together.

Needless to say...

[Tough Love]

Needless to say, these are outselling Lumia/Windows phones by a fat country mile.

Re:Needless to say...

[21mhz]

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?

Re:Needless to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your point being?

Windows phone is a failure - it doesn't sell.

See, that wasn't soo hard now was it.

Re:Needless to say...

[bitt3n]

"fat-country mile (n): the distance, in certain western democracies, between where you are now and any second point to which someone suggests you might walk."

Re:Needless to say...

[Patch86]

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.

Re:Needless to say...

[21mhz]

1: Windows doesn't sell on cheap phones.
2: Windows doesn't sell on expensive phones.
3: Microsoft does not profit.

I'm confused. We were talking about Nokia selling S40 on cheap phones, and Windows Phone on expensive phones, right? How did the goalposts move to WP throughout the whole price range and Microsoft's profits?
BTW, Windows Phone does sell on (not too) expensive phones.

Asha 305 w/ Nokia suite desktop == smartphone

[SpzToid]

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
https://www.nokia.com/global/support/nokia-pc-suite-specifications/?view=detail

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).

A more appropriate question

[Anonymous Coward]

Are smartphones 'smart' or do they just have a load of features and 'smart' is a meaningless marketing term to satisfy the ego of those who purchase such devices. 'I've got a smartphone! I am so smart!'

Smartphone vs Feature phone

[Dynamoo]

What's the difference between a smartphone and a feature phone? Today we see feature phone with far more features than old smartphones have, for example: the Nokia Asha 311 has WiFi, 3G, a 1GHz CPU, capacitive touchscreen, media player, radio and Bluetooth. The only thing missing from a typical modern smartphone is GPS.

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

[ChunderDownunder]

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.

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.

Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone

[Anonymous Coward]

The first and great Nokia problem in management, and because of that they always have done the wrong think wen they were in the right path (s90 is an example as they abandoned it), before the Symbian foundation there was a rumour about Nokia dropping Symbian, at least in name, in favor of a new and scalable from featurephones to smartphones OS, this OS was going to be basically a cleaned Symbian from legacy code and other things, with a easier development environment and api. Well that was the things that the Symbian Foundation where doing until the "Elop disaster", they didn't change the name of Symbian and it with a new name had possibilities for a successful relaunch of the OS.

Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone

[Anonymous Coward]

In my pocket now I have a Sony Ericsson Elm J10i2 "featurephone"

It has a 5mp camera / video recorder, video calling, mp3 player, FM radio, web browser, 3G internet, mail client, loads of storage (with Micro-SD slot), bluetooth, Wifi, GPRS, media player... I can't think of anything it lacks compared to a "smart phone" except a big screen (that would be useful), touchscreen technology (meh, buttons is fine for me) and an "app store" (I can quite happily install .jar software, for example opera mini, anyremote, dweller. Sadly .jar software is becoming more and more rare these days.) It's 2 or 3 years old now and the battery will still last several days of normal use. I doubt the same could be said of even a new iphone or Android device.

As far as I'm concerned it's brilliant, it's easily the best phone I've ever owned (second best: Ericsson T39m). My only complaints are (a) it has the word "Sony" on it and (b) it has some annoying useless links to Facebook and Twitter built in to the interface that I can't get rid of.

Posted AC for obvious reasons.

Cool story bro.

Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone

[Anonymous Coward]

... that, and they sacked all of the people who wrote Symbian/S60, and outsourced the rest to Accenture.

I know. I was made redundant too.

Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps they have a binding agreement with a major smartphone OS vendor; but we'd know about that...

Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone

[21mhz]

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.

Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone

[CockMonster]

Symbian was designed by several phone manufacturers, there was no 'one-designer'. It's not unmaintainable at all, but it was difficult to write for as developers had to know about things uch as asynchronicity (you'd be surprised by how many can't get this right... every API in Symbian was asynchronous - it saved battery). As for S40, when I left Nokia they were considering a rewrite because expanding the platform became so difficult. What saved it was that it seemed to have a long-term group of developers who knew it inside out and they were mostly all in Denmark and Finland. Symbian OS was developed in London and then it spread out to India and China. Quality dropped.

Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone

[Anonymous Coward]

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 present

Just like Android-Dalvik, then?

Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can write native code for Android with NDK. WP7 is a feature phone OS by this definition, and WP8 isn't.

Hardly spin

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Hardly spin

[maroberts]

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!

In 1991, I had a 33Mhz 486 and 8Megs of RAM, with 512K video card and thought I had a powerful system....

Re:Hardly spin

[CastrTroy]

Don't think I've ever seen a desktop computer with 1 GHz CPU and 128 megs of RAM. By the time 1 GHz CPUs came on the scene, most people had probably about 1 GB of RAM, possibly 512 MB. The last computer I had with 128 MB of RAM was a PII-266. Actually it originally had 64 MB of RAM and I upgraded to 256, but that was the last computer I had in that range. 128 MB doesn't get you very far these days. I had a Nokia phone with 128 MB of RAM and it would often crash the browser with out of memory errors if I loaded up the wrong page. Loading a Slashdot article would do it just about every time. It's probably enough memory to do most phone operations, except browse the web, which is a major shortcoming in these days. Also, very disappointed this phone doesn't have GPS. That phone I linked to had amazing GPS reception. Way better than I've had on any "smart" phone.

Re:Hardly spin

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing that was 2 decades ago ...

Re:Hardly spin

[Criton]

A 1GHz cpu is hardly Jurassic it would have been a top of the line phone processor just a few years ago. The iphone 4 only had a 1Ghz cpu. Now the ram is very limited but S40 does not need much memory.

Re:Hardly spin

[toddestan]

Obviously you haven't seen many budget systems sold by bottom feeding retailers like Walmart and Best Buy. I've seen plenty of P4-based Celeron systems boasting 2Ghz+ clock speeds with only 128MB of ram, integrated graphics, and Windows XP. Runs about as well as you might expect, but since they were cheap they still seemed to sell relatively well until about 2003 or so when they finally bumped the low-end stuff up to 256MB.

These are the same people that would sell you a 512MB system a few years later running Vista.

Re:Hardly spin

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never seen a brand new computer with both vista and only 512mb of ram. You're a fucking liar.

Even netbook running Windows XP like the Dell Mini were upgraded to 1 gigabyte of ram.

Re:For the love of god... ^^^ this

[maroberts]

Just take the N900 design, make the processor faster. Add a bit more RAM and fix that bloody usb connector and then sell it as a featurephone spun as a smartphone.
You'll still be a fucked company, but at least you'll have the best goddamn phone on the market.

(From a geek point of view).

.For your genius to be complete and for a phone that the Gods themselves would use, suggest they add the 41MP Pureview sensor in too.

Next time, post wisdom like this as a proper user - you'll have incredible Karma in no time!!

So, how well do they works?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's talk business then: I need my phone to sync contacts/calender/mail with the cloud, be able to do some light browsing (I dont need javescript) and a solid music player (an area where I have found Android to be lacking compared to iPhone and the N8 I briefly used). O, and a solid battery (light use 5days+).

Is the Asha suitable for such use?

Android phone producers started it first....

[Anonymous Coward]

By redefining the "smartphone" as a phone with touchscreen and faster processor, in ordet to make Nokia's symbian phones look bad. So it's only fair for Nokia to borrow the trick of its opponents.

Re:Android phone producers started it first....

[Anonymous Coward]

The term "smartphone" is much older than Android. The VisorPhone was once a new entrant in the well-established field of smartphones

What's a smartphone?

[Compaqt]

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:What's a smartphone?

[21mhz]

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.

Re:What's a smartphone?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Except that most of the comments so far are not swallowing this article/summary at all.
Summary "Unless you define Smartphone in such a way as to deliberately exclude these phones, they do in fact qualify as such" or "The distinction between low-end "Smartphones" and high-end "Feature phones" is essentially marketing".

Re:What's a smartphone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if it actually had the definitions that would show the article for the drivel it is, it wouldn't be a very good hit-piece now would it?

Re:What's a smartphone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares what is a smartphone or featurephone?

As long as it is not running Windows it is a good phone.

iPhones, Android phones, Symbian phones, S40 phones, Meego phones, Bada phones, Blackberry phones.
Everyone is a winner except that turd from Microsoft.

Even the sales of budget S40 Asha phones are required to prop up the dire financial condition of Nokia. What does that tell you about Windows phones?
No. one. cares. about. Windows. phones.

This is not new for Nokia

[LostMyBeaver]

Nokia has sold feature phones with Symbian Series 60 on them for ages and called the smart phones. The point was that they were theoretically running a smart phone operating system. Of course, the target market for the phones were generally markets such as elderly women (granny phones). In addition, they were generally phones which were given away for free with cheap contracts. So they weren't really selling them to consumers.

In fact, if you were to tell the people receiving those telephones that they were so "fancy" and had all these "smart phone features", they would in fact choose another telephone which was "simpler".

Those phones will continue to sell quite a lot so long as Nokia continues selling them with big numbers and screens which can be read when you hold them close to your face.

I have never met anyone who is even kinda cool that has a Nokia smart phone when you consider a smart phone to be something actually useful for more than using as a telephone and maybe listening to the radio or music files. The only people I've ever seen with the are people who wear ties as a status thing.

WTF is a 'Feature Phone'

[Martin S.]

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.

Re:WTF is a 'Feature Phone'

[na1led]

The Wireless Carriers will define what a smart phone is. If your phone has too many features, like "3mp or better camera, gps, etc." they will call it a smart phone, so they can force you into purchasing a data plan. I've seen older touchscreen phones that once came without a data plan, but now they require you to get a data plan. It's just another way to force people into paying for something they don't need. You want a phone with a good camera, or maybe gps, you'll be forced into getting a data plan.

Re:WTF is a 'Feature Phone'

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how it is in Asia, but here in Brazil you are not required to have a data plan, you can buy an iPhone 4S ,a Galaxy S3, a nokia lumia and only pay for voice use. My parents both have smartphones but the only internet connection they get is via wifi.

Re:WTF is a 'Feature Phone'

[Criton]

What's to up front cost in the US the carriers use the data plan with actually cost them next to nothing to implement on top of voice to subsidize the phone. Yes you can get a Lumia for $50,A Galaxy for $100, a Pantec for free or an Iphone for $100 but it's with a two year plan. If you buy the phone outright no plan you end up seeing the true price of the device which is usually $300 to $500 of course if you do this you should not have to buy a tiered data plan as it's cost is to subsidize the phone.

Where does this bullshit keep coming from?

[21mhz]

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 saying that iPhone "does not have enough features" back in 2007 and boasting the overwhelming market share of their then-favorite manufacturer, which ironically was Nokia.

Re:Where does this bullshit keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if those people ever think "oh, i was wrong, maybe i'll watch myself before ruling out any change in the market", or is it selective amnesia, maybe a healthy does of lying to ones self.

Re:Where does this bullshit keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, remembering similarities is good, but analyzing differences is better.

iPhone was discarded as a failure for bringing new and unproven concepts into the market, WP is discarded because they bring the same things you already have in iOS and Android late in the game.

But, sure, 2013 will be the year of Linux des^W^WWindows mobiles. It's not like they still sell only a few millions two years after the launch. If you turn off your selective amnesia, you might remember current market leaders rising to tens of millions sold in year or two after release.

Re:Where does this bullshit keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

google, apple and rim maybe but that's because they were new kids on the block, there isn't any previous history for them to be performing poor. Look at motorola, htc and samsung though, and they can have very poor years before nailing a product.

GetJar has 50,000 JavaME apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know if Nokia has downloaded that many of them to their own app store though.

http://www.getjar.com/

Re:GetJar has 70,000 JavaME apps

[Anonymous Coward]

70,000 apparently.

The CEO killed Symbian

[Anonymous Coward]

They've dropped from 30 million shipments per quarter to 6 million inside 9 months... WITH NO VIABLE REPLACEMENT TO TRANSITION TO!!!!!

Nokia can't ship Symbian (S60) devices, nobody will take them. Except maybe the 808 Pureview.

So from their point of view the low end is going to have to be S40. Windows requires a dual core CPU, it's never, ever going to run on the current S40 scale hardware, which means the margins are going to be tight.

Sell, sell, sell...

[flyingfsck]

It looks like Nokia realized that their purpose is to make and sell phones that people want and can use. Which OS the stupid thing is running doesn't matter. What matters is whether it works or not.

Only diff between "feature" and "smart"...

[dalias]

...is that AT&T gets to force you onto an insanely overpriced data plan you don't want if they call it "smart".

Smartphone versus featurephone

[Anonymous Coward]

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

"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."

Re:Smartphone versus featurephone

[Anonymous Coward]

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

"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."

Sadly, even that is insufficient. What about devices with identical functionality except for this internal hardware difference?

Has this happened? Yes: there are single-cored Nokia S60 devices since around 2006 where the GSM stack (sometimes in it's own 'hosted OS') is run as a service on top of the kernel. You wouldn't be able to spot the difference between a single-core S60v3 device and a device with the GSM stack on a separate core without cracking open the case (or reading the tech specs).

Signed?

[tepples]

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.

Re:Signed?

[Luckyo]

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.

My take on Nokia's stock price increase

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Disclaimer: I'm not a financial analyst, I'm just some dude on Slashdot.

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 Microsoft and that Asia sales are strong. I think the con people are right though. Their arguments, which I believe carry more weight, are that Nokia's partnership with Microsoft has failed big time. Nobody is buying the phones and even worse, Nokia has had to gut the price of the current ones to get rid of them with the dirty little secret that some buyers may not know that the next version of Windows for Smartphones won't work on the current models Nokia is selling. Also, Nokia is basically cleaning up on the low cost, garbage phones of the industry. Is it really a path to profitability to say, in effect, "We are the king of low end crap phones!"? Apple and most of the major players like Samsung have shrugged off this low cost market and they're willing to let Nokia have it without much of a fight. I suspect that eventually the stock market will realize that Nokia has a losing hand and the price will plummet. My belief about a month ago was that by the end of the year Nokia would be under $1 a share in the US and facing delisting and having to do a reverse stock split to keep from being delisted. I still believe that will happen but I'd move the time table to sometime next year, probably in the first half of 2013. I think Nokia is finished as a maker of smartphones in the developed world but they can hang on as a much smaller company picking up the low cost crumbs of third world sales if they want.

Will never see basic phones with real features

[na1led]

Try finding a phone with a good camera on it without having to pay a data plan, there is none. They purposely make the basic phones junk, forcing everyone to buy a smart phone so the wireless carriers can make more money.

Re:Will never see basic phones with real features

[bingoUV]

Come on, the Nokia pure view 38MP camera debuted on an S40 phone. So while "they" do what you say, Nokia is definitely not one of "them".

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Anymore stupid questions?

JavaME?

[devent]

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.

smartphone = full browser

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what iphone and android have, that other wannabe "smartphones" don't and cannot emulate: a full browser with features at parity with desktop browsers.

The lines between the two are blurred.

[Criton]

When you think about it the lines between a feature phone and a smart phone are very blurred. I guess you could make the call that a true smart phone allows native OS apps like the Lumia or N9 and a feature phone only allows java apps.

Patents

[tepples]

there is really no reason why capable android phones can't come down in price enough to be competitive in that market.

How much are Microsoft and Apple going to want per unit for patent licenses?

Signature

[tepples]

javaME: I can install any ME app I can find

Sure, the app will run; it just won't be able to do anything. I've read that a lot of U.S. carriers configure phones to deny Internet connection privileges to self-signed applications.

Re:Signature

[bickerdyke]

Well, Apple denies even running to any app not signed by apple

Your argument proofs that it is possible to build a useless dumbphone that runs on JavaME, but thats no contradiction to the argument that you might szill be able to build a usefull smartphone with it, and without Android or iOS

That still leaves open the question? what IS a smartphone? And what the &%&%& is a "featurephone" and what idiot came up with that word?

NDK

[tepples]

The difference with iOS is that you're not stuck running in a VM. It uses a more jail-like concept to sandbox the app, which is much lighter weight than running a full VM.

I thought NDK apps for Android ran the same way.

Exactly what the carriers want

[tepples]

What Nokia are doing is moving the 'smart' into the cloud.

Which is exactly what the carriers want so that they can bill per bit for access to the cloud.

Case study

[KZigurs]

Was original iPhone a month after its release a featurephone or a smartphone?

Not many people remember, but there was already a fairly healthy ecosystem in J2ME software, especially sites like getjar.com.

Feature = more than voice+SMS, less than PDA

[tepples]

I gather from Wikipedia that a smartphone is defined as a PDA with cellular voice, SMS, and Internet access. This means any mobile phone that does at least everything that a Newton or Palm or Pocket PC PDA did is a smartphone. A feature phone is defined as more than voice and SMS but less than a smartphone. For example, if third-party applications cannot access the Internet, it's a feature phone because it's less capable than a PDA. Often, U.S. carriers demand hooks in the operating system to downgrade a low-end smartphone to feature-phone capability.

Re:Feature = more than voice+SMS, less than PDA

[bickerdyke]

I gather from Wikipedia that a smartphone is defined as a PDA with cellular voice, SMS, and Internet access. This means any mobile phone that does at least everything that a Newton or Palm or Pocket PC PDA did is a smartphone.

While I don't trust definitions on Wikipedia, let's stick with that for the sake of the argument.

A feature phone is defined as more than voice and SMS but less than a smartphone

But what should that be? Even my second cellphone had an addressbook and a calendar integrated, and thus the full feature set of my PalmIII (that was definitly an PDA)

So a Smartphone is a PDA plus phone and a feature Phone is a Phone plus PDA?

For example, if third-party applications cannot access the Internet, it's a feature phone because it's less capable than a PDA. Often, U.S. carriers demand hooks in the operating system to downgrade a low-end smartphone to feature-phone capability.

Come on... installing apps and having those apps access the internet was par for said PalmIII 15 years ago..... I doubt that the ability of running apps and block internet access for those apps in return should earn a phony any title but "crap".

Re:Feature = more than voice+SMS, less than PDA

[tepples]

I doubt that the ability of running apps and block internet access for those apps in return should earn a phony any title but "crap".

The U.S. market has shown that home users are willing to buy "crap" if "crap" is what the carriers are willing to sell them.

Jayanthi Rangarajan says:

[Anonymous Coward]

James from Nokia should shut up and stick to discussing things he knows about.

The incredible browsing technology inside Nokia smartphones was developed by an innovative and bleeding-edge company from Chicago called Novarra. Nokia bought Novarra.

Not everything that's great from Nokia was developed at Nokia.

Feature phones out sell smartphones in Asia by 4X

[Anonymous Coward]

in Q2 2012 Feature phones outsold smartphones. This is even more relevant in Asia/Africa. It is not just about the phones technical capabilities but also the network's capacity to deliver data. Many networks in the developing world are constrained. Then you have factor in power. How long does your droid or iphone last on a single charge? A day? A feature phone with a cloud based technology for browsing the net and delivering applications services such as Opera, Nokia browser or biNu make absolute sense to the consumer. They want the features of a smartphone, don't want to pay the current price and also get advantages of a cloud based infrastructure. Where data costs $$$$ this is savvy.