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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

Windows Phone has its issues, but Featurephone?

[RanCossack]

That's too cruel, really.

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

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...

This just in

[wonkey_monkey]

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

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.