Every Mobile Web meeting I have, this question pops up, what is a Smartphone? Is my mobile a Smartphone? How is it different than the normal Phones or even PDAs? It’s been a hard month answering different people with different backgrounds about how Mobiles are different.
The Catch
As mobile phones advance and get more processing power, memory and performance, the advancement of their Software and functionalities take a faster pace, so the meltdown of categories is becoming confusing to explain and even showcase.
A Smartphone would be a phone with Calendar, Organizer, Contact manager, e-Mail client, and what is most important for business users: does it Sync with my Outlook?
So which phone in the market now a days doesn’t support all that? Most of the phones do, which gets us back to the question, so what is a Smartphone? Is it mobiles packed with Microsot Windows Mobile Smartphone OS or is it one of those SP-branded phones (such as i-mate SP2,3, etc…)
At dots and lines where we offer our Mobile Web service, we try to explain to our clients about how different Mobiles are when it comes to web-browsing experience and capabilities, so we categorize mobiles in terms of ability to view normal web pages w/o optimization and the memory limits that some phones have. While promoting mobile web best practices and selling consultancy to clients we define mobiles capabilities and explain why a website has to be optimized to serve users while not hurting their pockets and saving them time and effort. So here is when we say phones come in different types such as PDA mobiles, Smartphones, and low-end consumer phones. Bam! questions pop up. What do you mean by PDA mobiles? How are they different from Smartphones? What is a Smartphone anyways?
While we care about web-browsing the most, the idea gets very broad to explain. Smartphones are phones with high processing power(300MHZ+), higher RAM and a good capacity for Storage(Disk). Usually, a QWERTY keyboard is associated with Smartphones capabilities along with Touch Screens, which are not a smartphone-only features. Advanced OSes, Web browsers, and E-mail clients along with ability to parse and save MS Office files and PDF are the basice features that are expected on Smartphones, and the newly supported RSS feeds go there too. So where did PDA phones go? Smartphones are the new PDA phones, so for future explainations, we’re slashing off the PDA phones and join them to Smartphones.
Very soon, we expect to get back to the normal term “Mobile Phone”, since mobiles get so advanced fast, I don’t think we’ll have a phone that is not smart enough to be called a Smartphone soon.
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