May 19th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »
Forrester Research has announced that the term Smartphone is no longer valid. All current phones are smart according to the company, though some phones seem smarter than others.
There has never been a clear definition of what a smartphone is. Most people regarded an open development platform for native games as ‘smart’ though others said that multitasking and/or cut and paste functionality are valid criteria. This being said, the iPhone (up to firmware version 2.0) would just be just a dumb phone. Yet, the global media and consumers see it as a smartphone.
According to Forrester’s report, smart and dumb should no longer describe a phone. Instead, we should be looking at the software possibilities of a device. “Openness and Scalability”, “Consumption and Creation” and “utilities and entertainment” should typecast a device.
Though these are nice thoughts, the term smartphone is so common these days; we don’t expect that it will fade away after this research.
