Austin Lane

Most of the general public has heard the term “Smartphone” as people are demanding that their mobile phones do more than just make phone calls. Mobile phone users want to do everything from keep contact lists, send emails, text messages, and voice mails to take and send pictures, video streaming, and calendar and business applications. Essentially, instead of having to carry around a mobile phone AND a PDA (like a Palm or IPaQ with the Palm OS or Windows Mobile), users want to be able to have it all in one device. This is really the essence of the current definition of a smartphone.

Here at Austin Lane, when we use the term smartphone, it applies to a very limited number of devices currently on the market. In our ALMobile world, it means that it is a phone that runs complete operating system software providing a standardized interface and platform for application developers.

Key to this definition is the term “complete operating system”. All of the Palm OS-based phones provide a truly complete OS that allows for developers such as ourselves to provide great solutions for business needs and processes. Many “Windows Mobile” phones are not a true complete version of the operating system. Microsoft actually offers a several flavors of the operating system. Some include Microsoft Office, and others don’t. Some include the ability to work with a touchscreen, and others don’t. For most third party applications to run on the Microsoft-based smartphones, they must be touchscreen enabled and work with the Microsoft ActiveSync software on a laptop or PC.

Indeed, it turns out that many (including Austin Lane) do not consider the newly touted iPhone from Apple to be a smartphone. It is restricted in synchronization capabilities, and it does not yet provide a platform that is open for developers to create solutions for personal or business applications.

For more discussions about smartphones, here are some links:

Smartphone - Wikipedia
Analysis: What is a smart phone?
The iPhone is not a smartphone

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 11:07 am and is filed under Internet, Mobile Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.