Smartphones Part 2: What does your phone say about you?

As I’d discussed in yesterday’s post, I’d joked with my main man RoninPowride that I was going to limit my friends to folks with smartphones. While not honestly a serious consideration, I did decide to explore the topic further: what was the appeal?

Obviously this whole smartphone era was born out of very specific business needs; business folks on the go needed a way to receive messages, eventually send/receive email, an as time went on, these devices merged with phones. Initial attempts were awkward and weird. The Handspring Visor, a popular, late 90’s PDA, had a handful of “modules that were able to plug into its backside. One of these later modules was the (cleverly named my marking wizards) Visor Phone. It was one of the first integrations of both. Advantages? You could look up your contacts from within your PDA. But sending email and using the “web” (and I say that loosely) still required you to actually dial up an ISP connection from the device, modem style. At a blazing 9.6kbps.  At the same time, RIM was developing the first BlackBerry devices; early devices were amazing little email machines, but the first were not usable as phones—even the ones that eventually became phones were clunky and “usable” at best.

What am I getting at here? Well, in short, smartphones were originally intended for a more business-geared market, but since then have flourished into cross-platform media devices.  Web browsing, IM, apps, music, etc have all taken priority on these devices.  Some have done a good job “growing up,” and others have moved entirely away from a traditional platform.

Smartphone, by nature, is a pretty generic term.  The iPhone and a Blackberry are miles apart in terms of intended functionality, however, thanks to celeb marketing, the Blackberry has become a recognized brand for the regular consumer—even though the phone has a billion features and security parameters that are meaningless to the average user.  The iPhone, on the other hand, is a pure consumer and media driven device.  I know that folks will debate me about this tooth and nail, but the iPhone is NOT an excellent business device.  Factor number 1, in my mind, is the lack of a physical keyboard or even any sort of haptic feedback (though poorly implemented on the Blackberry Storm).

Interestingly, the desire to have some smartphone functionality for low-end consumers has spawned dumbphones with QWERTY keyboards.  They can text, they can do some web surfing, but they lack the capacity and horsepower of most traditional smartphones.

Ultimately, I do think that many users have smartphones for the sake of keeping a status symbol—it takes a certain level of geekiness to get every ounce of potential out of these devices.  In introducing Ronin to the smartphone world, we did exactly that; and now he’s settled on a middle-of-the-road device.  Is this a bad thing?  Absolutely not.  He didn’t spend too much money, and he’s using it to it’s fullest.

Tune in later in the week when I break this down further: which phones/mobile OS’s should be right for each consumer group.

by mashthekeys
10 months ago