When Firefox talks about $25 handsets and Nokia launches a €29 phone
that has Facebook and Twitter and Bing search, and an €89 phone with
Skype and Android apps, it's time to start asking what a smartphone
actually is.
Things are perhaps a little clearer right at the bottom end, where we
can still point at a phone and say "this is a featurephone". The
recently announced €29 Nokia 220 runs what the company coyly refers to
as Nokia OS; that's the basic, real-time, "does the phone bits"
operating system that doesn't have any APIs for developers to code
against.
The UI and the apps must be built in something else, which we're
assuming is a cut-down version of S40 — or possibly even a derivative of
the near defunct S30. It's clearly a featurephone, as there's no
third-party software development and no app store — but by adding social
apps and a cloud-accelerated browser, it's clear that featurephones are
no longer just phones that make calls and send texts and have a game or
two to keep you occupied.
Higher up the scale sits another Nokia range, its Asha phones.
They're still classed as featurephones, but with touchscreens with
reasonable resolution, they're on a par with the original iPhone.
There's even some scope for application development with S40's J2ME
APIs, though they're really only for trusted Nokia partners. But there's
one big difference between the Asha and the old featurephone model
which leaves the phone the same the day your contract ran out as the day
you bought it: Asha gets upgrades.
It's an odd combination: a featurephone with some smartphone
capabilities. So we probably shouldn't be surprised that some high-end
Ashas are being marketed as smartphones — especially when they're being
sold in markets that are being targeted by locally developed Android
devices from companies such as Karbonn.
The rise of the low-cost Android devices has to be seen as a threat
to Nokia's low cost, emerging markets business, as the capabilities of
those low-cost Android devices built for exactly those markets outpace
the ageing S40/Nokia OS combination.
It's a situation that neatly brings us to the Nokia X, with its forked variant of the AOSP platform. It runs Android apps so it must be a smartphone, right? Maybe.
Nokia sold vast amounts of Symbian phones and they were technically
smartphones, because you could install extra apps on them. But in
practice, most people installed only one or two extra apps on their
Symbian devices. They bought them to make calls, send texts, take
photos, play games, listen to music, maybe look at a map and do some web
searches — and they picked them because they were cheap.
These are the devices that sub-$200, and now sub-$100, Android phones
have been replacing in vast swathes; the not-actually-dumb phones, that
are still a long way away from a top-end Nexus or Droid (or iPhone or
Lumia). It's a market BlackBerry used to do well in with its pre-pay phones.
Sold on a family plan so you got two for the price of one and with a
great keyboard for texting on, plus free messaging with BBM, they were
great value. They were built with features like dual-SIM, and made with
last year's processor for a much lower cost and in much higher volume.
If you're a heavy smartphone user, you have a tiny computer in your
pocket that brings you the web and Twitter, summons your Uber ride, lets
you share a Secret, record Vines, edit documents, book hotels, track
flights, listen to Pandora, crush candy, destroy pigs and birds alike,
fly quadricopters and drive robot balls, and continually try out the
latest new app.
You're living in a rich, rich world of information and entertainment
and control and connectivity. But even if your phone can do all of that,
not everyone will do it all (or want to do it all) - even though they
want more from a phone than just talking and texting. It wasn't just
fashion that stopped BlackBerrys from selling, after all. But there are
people who still want a phone with a flashlight rather than a flashlight
app.
If we could figure out how many Android phones (and even last year's
model cheaper iPhones) are bought as smart feature phones, we'd have a
much better idea of what the real smartphone market looks like. With
most statistics about app usage from the US, it's hard to get a global
picture — and harder still to get a breakdown of app usage on lower cost
devices.
Asha's success makes it clear that it's not necessary to have a
bustling app ecosystem to sell outside the EU and US, just a handful of
key apps built into the device. With Nokia X in 70 or so markets, it's
going to be interesting to see if it replaces Asha, or competes with
regional device manufacturers that are using Android like Karbonn.
Obviously not everyone who buys a cheaper smartphone picks it because
they don't need more power. If you're on a fixed budget, you're on a
fixed budget. But it seems equally clear that a modern featurephone
looks much more like a smartphone than it used to.
Facebook and web search and Twitter and expandable memory for photos
and music are part of the basics — and messaging services such as Skype
and WhatsApp are joining them. Something that plays YouTube videos and
Spotify channels and Minion Rush might be a smartphone — or that might
all be just what a good featurephone does these days.