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“Smartphone” is the wrong name

loup-vaillant.fr

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Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#31

Post by Freak_NL »

castell wrote: post #4

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

Pocket PC still sounds nice, but Apple's marketing efforts caused the meaning of the word to become unclear. Pocket computer is perhaps the most neutral term available.

For the average consumer this semantic discussion won't change their perception of those devices though. The masses for now have settled on the three categories of smartphone, tablet, and laptop/desktop computer.

(Even more frustrating is that every piece of software, service, and website you use on those devices, and in some countries even a text message is called simply app.)

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#33

Post by agumonkey »

coldtea wrote: post #18
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…

90% of the time I need direct blind access to simple functions. Now I have to carefully swipe, carefully otherwise the app goes into gallery mode, or the picture is taken, and since I was pushing on the screen, it's blurry and I need two hands to do so.

Side picture buttons are increasingly rare if not defunct, volume rockers are still here though.

A lot of things that could be done quickly is now fragile and subtle. A side effect of translating desktop UX to IRL handheld gadgets, by the promise that software will be smart enough to make it one button away.

psedit: as noted below, I indeed never realized the volume rocker was bound to snapshot. My rant is half void now u_u;

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#35

Post by rangibaby »

Freak_NL wrote: post #28
wodenokoto wrote: post #11

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 h…

In that respect, I miss the word 携帯. スマホ ( sumaho , ugh!) feels so uncultivated in such a pleasant language. It was a predictable outcome though. Japanese has a tendency to abbreviate common words, and the term smartphone (the unwieldy スマートフォン/sumātofon) was imported with the first generations of smartphones. The German Handy on the other hand (as ccozan mentions)… What a lovely word.

I only hear people using スマホ to differentiate them from feature phones ガラ携 (Galapagos phone, also a homonym for "junk phone"). 携帯 is still the general term for "cellphone".

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#36

Post by masklinn »

greggman wrote: post #21
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…

Microsoft was considered to have a monopoly (whether you or I agree). As such they were subject to different rules. Apple, especially when iPhone launched, did not have any kind of monopoly on cellphones nor did they have one on PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did. People mostly didn't care. Companies like Sun and Netscape cared…

Yep. The issue of MSIE wasn't so much bundling a browser, as leveraging an existing monopoly into a second one and unfairly driving out competition.

> As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did.

People did sue Microsoft as the US Federal Government (United States v. Microsoft Corp.) and as the European Commission (Microsoft Corp v Commission), even if those cases may have been prompted by company complaints (that was the case for Microsoft Corp v Commission, not sure for United States v. Microsoft Corp.)

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#38

Post by Zigurd »

Articles like this gloss over how small tweaks to a product put it in a different category, with large commercial consequences. In the case of smartphones, having a mobile network radio is a very large difference in capabilities, price, operating cost and channel. Smartphones are the largest business on the planet and growing, and tablets have stumbled for not having met their potential in displacing enough PCs in office productivity use cases. Smaller distinctions are important within the smartphone and tablet markets, like "phablets" and various size and price categories for tablets, and for not-quite-tablets like "convertibles." Microsoft tried and failed in multiple product generations to turn PCs into tablets, while in Windows CE and NETCF they had the basic formula for a modern smartphone but they treated NETCF like a red headed stepchild. Small differences, big results.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#39

Post by TheCoreh »

agumonkey wrote: post #33
coldtea wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

90% of the time I need direct blind access to simple functions. Now I have to carefully swipe, carefully otherwise the app goes into gallery mode, or the picture is taken, and since I was pushing on the screen, it's blurry and I need two hands to do so. Side picture buttons are increasingly rare if not defunct, volume rockers are still here though. A lot of things that could be done quickly is now fragile and subtle.…

The volume rocker is usually a picture button, no?

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#40

Post by oxplot »

agumonkey wrote: post #33
coldtea wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

90% of the time I need direct blind access to simple functions. Now I have to carefully swipe, carefully otherwise the app goes into gallery mode, or the picture is taken, and since I was pushing on the screen, it's blurry and I need two hands to do so. Side picture buttons are increasingly rare if not defunct, volume rockers are still here though. A lot of things that could be done quickly is now fragile and subtle.…

This can all be "fixed" in software. In fact, on my HTC One M8 which is running Cyanogenmod, if I double press the power button at anytime, it switches to camera app and I can then take photos by pressing either volume buttons. I don't need to (or do) look at the screen let alone interact with it.
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