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22 November 2007

The iPhone is not a Smartphone

When I think of a Smartphone, I think of a phone that has a clunky, arrow-navigated, tab-delimited interface of which half of the device is the keyboard. Let's call that a normal Smartphone. Wikipedia says that "A smartphone is a mobile phone offering advanced capabilities beyond a typical mobile phone, often with PC-like functionality." Normal phones nowadays have a camera, SMS texting and a phone component. Smartphones add in email, web browsing, a calendar and a bit more data storage (about 20MiB, which is measured in the interface in kilobytes). Smartphones often have outside expansion slots, and some can clumsily attempt to edit documents. Please note that you will not be as productive on your mobile phone as you will be on your laptop.


The iPhone changes all of that. Once Apple had sold one iPhone they had captured 100% of the market for phones with more than 2GB of flash built in. It also has a more media-oriented approach, bundling an iPod, iTunes and YouTube support. The iPhone puts some of the data you want on your home screen, in the form of widgets, weather, the calculator and a clock. However, the iPhone is "smart" because it displays more information with its icons than other phones, displaying the date on the calendar icon and badges on Phone, Text and Email. There are a lot more features that make it smarter as a phone, such as usable contacts and visual voicemail, but it is so much smarter than other phones, I would put it in a class by itself. I would call it an iPhone.

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