Monday
Jul092012
Question: why do we call them {smartphones} phones?
Monday, July 9, 2012 at 3:00AM Today's question comes from davast. The majority (95%) of my iPhone usage is web / email /pim / twitter / xls & doc files / sat nav. All of which have more individual weekly usage than the telephone bit.
Surely they really are PDAs (Personal digital Assistants) or just "Mobiles" now. What do you think? Is it time to drop the 'phone' tag?
Reader Comments (7)
Not yet. But maybe in years to come they may get called media communicators.
I have always thought of my Smartphone as a PDA with Telephony.
I may make 1 call per day, and an SMS per week (or less), so contracts with high call/txt volumes are useless.
The only plan which is of use is the 3G data, and even that is way under-utilised as I spend more time in the annex of my WiFi hotspot.
I doubt they will ever be called PDAs. That's an old tag and companies and media hate to go back, regardless of how suitable the tag is. For many of us, they are much more than phones, but for the majority, I expect that as a phone is still the primary use (this is just off the top of my head, I have no stats to back up this position - anyone?).
My pda has finally got phone functionality, and my phone is finally a decent pda. But what ever you call it, it isn't smart. The people who designed it maybe are, the people using it sometimes are as well, but do they use it smartly? Who knows. I just call it my mobile, since it lets me do a lot of things, but with mobility.
I get annoyed with luddites at work telling me that they just want a phone to make calls only (sniggering at those of us with iPhones etc). I always point out that it's actually a computer with a built in phone, not a phone with extra functions, which usually shuts them up.
Yep, a smartphone is not that "smart of a phone". It's just a PDA that, by coincidence, happens to have phone capabilities ;-)
I think that the term as we use it today is not right and needs to change to better serve our devices... I guess the world is just waiting for Apple's idea, right? ;-) Just like the Apps...
Maybe I will just begin to patent some names... to sell to Apple someday.