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“Smartphone” is the wrong name

loup-vaillant.fr

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Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#11

Post by wodenokoto »

Japanese cellphones had a lot of the same use-cases that modern smartphones have. You could buy stuff online, use GPS, surf the mobile web, send pictures via email and purchase stuff and movies (disney even produced direct to featurephone cartoons in Japan!).

This is usually used as an argument for why the Japanese decided to colloquially shorten 携帯電話 ("keitai denwa", hand-held telephone) into just 携帯(hand-held, or handy) instead of just calling it 電話(phone) like so many western countries do or 携電("kei-den"), which follows a more typical pattern for abbreviations in Japanese.

However, with the success of the iPhone, which was incompatible with all the featurephone services a new segment arose consisting of iPhones and non-backward compatible Android handsets, and these are denoted as "smartphones" shorten to スマホ(sma-pho).

I think it is interesting that they chose to move closer towards the "phone" moniker, than staying with the focus on hand-held.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#12

Post by agumonkey »

Lanari wrote: post #8
agumonkey wrote: post #5

Not even phones they're not handheld devices anymore. The lack of physical interface is very sad. Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. It's a small slate computer.

This. When smartphone first come up I was like I will wait until they get improved and calling some will get easier just as on my regular phone, years later and calling people and doing regular phone things becoming harder and harder.

It's very common when tech allows for too much, ideas that seem to make things simpler just make them shinier and potentially harder. Until the next wave of fauxgress comes in to attract the buyers. I consider our whole society a massive form of that, food, health .. it's all a backfire fest.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#13

Post by chroma »

> For instance, picture Microsoft in 2001, after it got sued for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Imagine what would have happened if they sold Windows XP with an exclusive application store. Imagine that every program must be approved by Microsoft to run on XP, and they take a 30% cut. Oh, and no interpreter allowed.

> They would have been sued into oblivion, lost half their customers, suffered one hell of a bad press. They could have sunk. Yet when Apple did exactly that to their new computer, the iPhone, few objected and customers flocked.

This just tells me that execution matters more than the initial idea. There's plenty of competition in the mobile space. If users didn't want Apple's locked-down ecosystem, they wouldn't buy iPhones. The vast majority of users don't care about side-loading apps or installing another operating system. They are (quite rationally) willing to sacrifice customization and app choices to avoid malware.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#14

Post by robbrown451 »

I doubt anyone is going to change what they call them (other than dropping the "smart" now that such features are becoming the default), but the point about not being able to install apps except though an app store with a monopoly is very true. Of course it tends to be true with tablets as well.

Maybe when we start to see more android devices that are in a laptop configuration we'll start to struggle more with that issue.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#15

Post by kalleboo »

In many countries they're mostly referred to as "mobiles" (as an abbreviation of "mobile phone"), especially now that nobody has feature phones anymore and there's no reason to make the distinction.

I find it perfectly vague yet easily understandable.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#16

Post by carlob »

kalleboo wrote: post #15

In many countries they're mostly referred to as "mobiles" (as an abbreviation of "mobile phone"), especially now that nobody has feature phones anymore and there's no reason to make the distinction. I find it perfectly vague yet easily understandable.

In Italy many people refer to mobiles as telefonino (lil' phone). I guess that doesn't really apply to phablets though :)

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#17

Post by pluma »

sschueller wrote: post #3

Better than what we call them in Switzerland. 'Handy', pronounced the English way.

Germany as well. I always heard it dates back to an early marketing thing.

There's also the old (~1990s) joke that it's actually Bavarian and short for "Hän die ken Schnür?" ("Haben die kein Kabel?" / "Do these not have a cord?").

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#18

Post by coldtea »

agumonkey wrote: post #5

Not even phones they're not handheld devices anymore. The lack of physical interface is very sad. Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. It's a small slate computer.

>Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen.

Are you kidding me? All of those functions are 10x easier to do on the "unfit touchscreen" that on what we had before that (tiny non-touch screens, LCDs, 80's style arrays of buttons, etc).

And when it comes to actually taking the picture, changing track or volume etc, smartphones even offer physical buttons on the sides.

Remember trying to get to the 10th track of the 4th folder in your "physical" CD mp3 player or minidisk? Setting anything more advanced than zoom level and picture mode on a typical 2002-2005 compact camera?

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#19

Post by decasteve »

castell wrote: post #4

Bill Gates called it the "Wallet PC", back in 1994. Later Pen-based computing. Later "Pocket PC".

Bill's description was pretty spot on too. I read The Road Ahead again recently and he was right about a lot of things. Though even with all that prescience Microsoft still missed the boat a number of things they saw coming a mile away.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#20

Post by pjc50 »

chroma wrote: post #13

> For instance, picture Microsoft in 2001, after it got sued for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Imagine what would have happened if they sold Windows XP with an exclusive application store. Imagine that every program must be approved by Microsoft to run on XP, and they take a 30% cut. Oh, and no interpreter allowed. > They would have been sued into oblivion, lost half their customers, suffered one hell of a…

The openness of the PC platform was something of an accident. The home microcomputers and the early Macs had their OS in ROM. There were competing PC operating systems (DR-DOS, DESQview, OS/2, etc) but Microsoft managed to kill off all the commercial competition.

But that was all pre-"web 1.0". Once computers started becoming routinely networked, we ended up with the malware problem which has driven us here. The user is in no position to accurately assess the safety of software, so as you say it's not such a bad choice to pick a locked platform to avoid malware.

The situation is an uncomfortable duopoly between the semi-open Android and locked-down Apple ecosystems. How long will this remain stable? I don't know.

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