.Dust

Dur­ing my daily scan for news I have found this inter­est­ing piece from Yahoo News.

There are two state­ments I would like to com­ment on:

Unlike reg­u­lar cell­phones, smart­phones have a PC-​like oper­at­ing sys­tem and down­load and run com­puter pro­grams. Most include advanced data fea­tures such as e-​mail, instant mes­sag­ing and word pro­cess­ing. Some, such as the Palm Treo and Sam­sung Black­Jack, have small typewriter-​style keyboards.

Computer-​like “smart” cell­phones are start­ing to go main­stream, cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for the wire­less industry.

I think that this def­i­n­i­tion can­not really be con­sid­ered fully valid as of today. This def­i­n­i­tion was per­fect in the early days of mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions where devices with­out an open oper­at­ing sys­tem could not be con­sid­ered smart at all.

Today the pic­ture is quite different.

The main point is that mobile phones do not need to have a computer-​line oper­at­ing sys­tem to be con­sid­ered smart. Most depends on what the end user per­ceives as being smart in rela­tion to a mobile phone.

If I’m a busi­ness road war­rior I will prob­a­bly con­sider smart some­thing that allows me to read my e-​mail, look at my office doc­u­ments and syn­chro­nize with my per­sonal com­puter address book, agenda and to-​do list. Prob­a­bly I will also look for an extended key­board to ease mes­sage writing.

If I am a photo enthu­si­ast I will not con­sider the busi­ness­man device too smart for my needs. I will instead go for a mobile phone with a good cam­era sen­sor, plenty of mem­ory to store my pho­tos while I’m on the go and some easy way to share my pho­tos with my fam­ily and friends. This is a smart­phone from this point of view.

If we look at mobile phones released in the last 6 months, spe­cially in the 3G mar­ket, I do not really see to many dif­fer­ences in terms of pro­cess­ing power and resources avail­able to the end user.

There is one point that we need to con­sider and that, prob­a­bly, still makes a dif­fer­ence between smart­phones and stan­dard phones: the Oper­at­ing System.

It’s very smart to allow the user to install what­ever appli­ca­tion he likes on his mobile phone and in this case the Yahoo News def­i­n­i­tion per­fectly fits. Stan­dard mobile phones will allow you to install appli­ca­tions using the Java envi­ron­ment but it’s a mat­ter of fact that alla Java appli­ca­tion will sit in a sand­box and will not inte­grate in any of the phone native functions.

Said this I think that the gap between smart­phones and stan­dard phone will be filled very soon. If we look at the long awaited, and not still released, new ver­sion of the Java envi­ron­ment (JSR 271 — Mobile Infor­ma­tion Device Pro­file 3) some­thing is changing.

Hav­ing the pos­si­bil­ity to run Java appli­ca­tion in the back­ground together with mul­ti­task­ing will make stan­dard phones very close, if not vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal, to what we call, today, smart­phones. This kind of func­tion­al­ity will make avail­able smart appli­ca­tions to non-​smartphone devices.

This last state­ment will lead us to talk about Oper­at­ing Sys­tems in the mobile envi­ron­ment. I will talk about this in another post since it’s a very inter­est­ing argument.

The other point raised from Yahoo News is the fact that smart­phones are going main­stream. This is true but I think that appli­ca­tions on mobile phones are going main­stream and it all depends on what kind of user you are.

Why do I blog this?

I think that there is not a real need for smart­phones. There is a need for smart applications.

Related posts:

1. links for 2006-​11-​23
2. links for 2006-​11-​22
3. links for 2006-​11-​27
4. links for 2006-​11-​24
5. What I want from a Music Phone