What Do You Call The iPhone When “Smartphone” Doesn’t Cut It?
Posted on 11 September 2009, at 8:00 am, by Dan Cohen
In an article on ZDNet Sam Diaz makes an interesting point related to yesterday’s announcement of the Motorola Cliq.
He writes:
Do you see that little green button down on the lower right corner of the screen? That’s the dialer – you know, like, for a phone call… Call these devices smartphones if you’d like – but increasingly, the phone part of the device is just another feature, another widget on the home page.
There seems to be a good deal of this going around these days, what with the iPod touch being referred to as “a great pocket computer” during the recent Apple music event.
And it seems to line up well with my experience as of late.
I’m about a week into using a Blackberry Bold and an iPhone. To be honest I don’t love using two devices. It is inconvenient and shatters the whole “convergence” idea. Still, the combination of the two is a great example of the whole being better than the sum of its parts. Add to that the fact that Google Voice and Gmail/GCal make it simple to switch from one to the other and, while inconvenient, the dual-device thing is totally doable in a way it wasn’t just a few short months ago.
With its Google Voice integration, the Blackberry is a fantastic phone for me. Moreover, it is a superb email device on its own, and with Vlingo making voice-to-text seamless, it is nothing short of amazing. But while the Blackberry does offer a selection of apps, it is limited by its low available memory, memory leaks and non-touchscreen. In other words, the Blackberry is a fantastic “smartphone”, with apps taking third place far (FAR!) behind its usefulness for voice, email and text.
The iPhone, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. It is a mediocre phone (there I said it) that can do email and text. It is however, limited compared to the Blackberry. For example, the TextExpander app works well, but is a separate app instead of integrating with the iPhone mail app. Compare that to the ease of setting up word replacement on the Blackberry and there is no question which is better. On the other hand, the iPhone is amazing for its computing power and prowess. The selection of apps is great, and the ability to interact with the touchscreen, use the accelerometer and load and use as many apps as the device’s storage allows, makes it a terrific pocket computer. It is SO good in fact that it makes me less reliant on my iMac or MacBook than ever before.
In other words the Blackberry is a phone with apps, while the iPhone is a pocket computer with phone integration. Or as the ZDNet piece put it,
One iPhone-carrying attendee told me that the majority of his time spent on the iPhone is through the apps – e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, banking, news”papers” and so on. The user-interface – the way you interact with the apps on the screen – is what’s appealing, he said. (That, plus the AT&T voice service was hit or miss anyway.)
So what do you call a device like the iPhone when “smartphone” really doesn’t cut it? I think Apple was on to something the other day when they used the term “pocket computer” but if that is too long for you maybe a simple “Handheld” does indeed cover it after all.
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September 11th, 2009 at 9:07 am
I think Smartphone is still a fair title for all of these convergence devices.
One has to be okay with sacrificing something to gain lots.
Will all these devices you give up features in one area to gain features in another.
Most of them are phones which are “smarter” because they do much more than the garden variety flip phone.
It’s nothing new. The search for the perfect phone is one that’s been going on for a long time.
Does it exist? We’ve debated it here and other places as well and the answer seems to be no.
Once you realize that and choose the device that best suits you things get easier.