Later, there will be no such thing as "SMARTPHONE"

The title above is a rough conclusion. This conclusion emerged from my observations during a trip to several cities around the island of Java. It's great to see how technology is being adopted in areas outside the big cities.

You can see everyone using the so-called "smartphone" in big cities such as Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta, while the surrounding small towns are filled with so-called "feature phones". Category smartphone filled by iPhone, Samsung/LG/Sony Ericsson mobile phones based on Android and mobile phones high-end Nokia while category feature phone consists of Nexian, Skybee, Huawei and less expensive devices.

So I'm trying really hard to understand this categorization, but I find this separation very shallow.

Current definition of smartphone according to Wikipedia: “…a high-end mobile phone. A smartphone combines the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone. Today's models typically also serve as portable media players and camera phones with high-resolution touchscreens, web browsers that can access and properly display standard web pages rather than only mobile-optimized sites, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi and mobile broadband access.”

While feature phone defined as: ” … is a mobile phone that, like smartphones, combines the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone. Today's models typically also serve as portable media players and camera phones with touchscreen, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi and mobile broadband access. Feature phones is the term generally used to describe low-end devices, with smartphone used to describe high-end devices, though there is no official definition to distinguish the two categories. The term originally referred to mobile phones with more features than other contemporary “ dumb"mobile phones".

Currently, the difference between smartphone and feature phone not clearly visible, the difference is visible faintly. A smartphone like iPhone or Android can feature WIFI, Bluetooth, third party apps, camera, GPS, social networking apps, etc. How about feature phone? Turns out they have the exact same features as smartphone! Only with cheaper (and likely weaker) hardware.

Smartphone can cost hundreds of dollars, most of them cost more than $200 while some feature phone cost less than $150. Is this a fair distinction for smartphone and feature phone? Of course not. It's more on the difference between phones Low-end and high-end, not a cell phone smart vs feature phone.

The differentiation is not in features or software, but mainly in hardware. Since the 70's, people saw the future potential in the software business and slowly left hardware development as a business with high margin potential, but there is a possibility hardware will be back in trend.

In the future, I think the fine line between smartphone and feature phone will slowly disappear. There will be no such thing smartphone. There is only ... a cell phone.

And Blackberry.