Nokia didn’t have any smartphones until late 2011. Only smarter phones. And what’s a smartphone anyway?
After Nokia issued a profit warning last week, I was trying to wrap my head around the steepness of its decline in smartphones. And then I realized that we’ve been looking at this thing the wrong way.
There is no Nokia decline in smartphones, there never was, and there never could have been. Because before the fall of 2011, when they released first Lumia phones, Nokia was never in a smartphone business at all.
What’s a smartphone?
The devices we call smartphones today were invented in 2007. By Apple. The first smartphone ever – was the iPhone. Just like with tablets after the iPad, the category of devices we used to call smartphones before iPhone, seized to be. It should have been folded into a wider “mobile phones” category, where they belonged all along.
“Smartphones” before 2007, were just smarter high-end phones, with apps as another feature among many. Other features included camera, e-mail, limited web browser, wi-fi, GPS, maps, etc;
Before iPhone, there was nothing inherently different between the smartphone and top of the line feature phone. Yes, smartphones could run third-party apps. But so could feature phones. J2ME apps were more limited than native ones, but they still were apps. As were apps on Qualcomm’s BREW platform. The main difference between smartphone and feature phone back then – was the level of access to handset functionality through various APIs. But both of them were still phones. Optimized for their primary purpose – voice calls and SMS messaging.
It’s amazing that for all the talk about smartphones for more than a decade now – nobody came up with a clear definition of what it is. Here’ what Wikipedia has to say about a smartphone today: A smartphone is a mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity, than a feature phone.
Some blog post I guess. But still interesting point about what is Smartphone actually. Do we own Smartphone or just a "Smarter" phone (compared to feature phone).
After Nokia issued a profit warning last week, I was trying to wrap my head around the steepness of its decline in smartphones. And then I realized that we’ve been looking at this thing the wrong way.
There is no Nokia decline in smartphones, there never was, and there never could have been. Because before the fall of 2011, when they released first Lumia phones, Nokia was never in a smartphone business at all.
What’s a smartphone?
The devices we call smartphones today were invented in 2007. By Apple. The first smartphone ever – was the iPhone. Just like with tablets after the iPad, the category of devices we used to call smartphones before iPhone, seized to be. It should have been folded into a wider “mobile phones” category, where they belonged all along.
“Smartphones” before 2007, were just smarter high-end phones, with apps as another feature among many. Other features included camera, e-mail, limited web browser, wi-fi, GPS, maps, etc;
Before iPhone, there was nothing inherently different between the smartphone and top of the line feature phone. Yes, smartphones could run third-party apps. But so could feature phones. J2ME apps were more limited than native ones, but they still were apps. As were apps on Qualcomm’s BREW platform. The main difference between smartphone and feature phone back then – was the level of access to handset functionality through various APIs. But both of them were still phones. Optimized for their primary purpose – voice calls and SMS messaging.
It’s amazing that for all the talk about smartphones for more than a decade now – nobody came up with a clear definition of what it is. Here’ what Wikipedia has to say about a smartphone today: A smartphone is a mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity, than a feature phone.
Some blog post I guess. But still interesting point about what is Smartphone actually. Do we own Smartphone or just a "Smarter" phone (compared to feature phone).
