To me, putting the word “smart” in front of something is the kiss of death. Think smart bombs, smart cards, smart set. Smart has always flattered the word that came after it. Smart phones are no different. Actually they’re worse.
The problem with smart phones is that they’re not really phones. I mean, they are, but they don’t do the phone bit half as well as an off-the-shelf little mobile phone you could buy in a backstreet Delhi electronics store. That phone could cost about US$25 new: about 20 times the cost of a smart phone.
So is the smart phone 20 times better?
Well, it depends on what you want it to do. Let’s compare two phones: Nokia’s cheapest ever phone, the 1280, which sells for about $25, with the new Google Nexus One, which sells for about $500. The Nexus One lets you check your email, play with maps, browse, and do all those things that geeks and bored commuters like to do. It sits in your palm like a svelte slice of marble.
The 1280, meanwhile does none of those things. It has a screen that looks like something out of the mid 1990s. But what it does do is have a battery life that could last up to 22 days. It lets you have five separate address books — great if you’re sharing the phone with other folk. It has a torch. An FM radio. A speaking clock. And a loud ringtone. It sits in your hand like a, well, rugged piece of plastic.
The thing is that it takes me much longer to make a phone call or send an SMS on my smart phone than it ever did on one of these Nokia cheapos.
Even answering a call is somewhat baffling, with the swishing and the swiping necessary to activate the screen. And the ringtones are so fancy and musical most of the time I miss the call.
On a Nokia phone you just hit the green key or start banging in the number you want to call.
SMS isn’t much better. I can always tell who has sent me an SMS on a simple phone with a keyboard and those who have to use a touch screen. One is fast and grammatical, the other looks like the sender’s been texting while on nappy changing duty.
As for call quality, well, iPhone users complain of drop out; people phoning my Google phone complained they either couldn’t hear me or that I sounded like I was in a well with six Martians repeating everything I said.
And don’t get me started on battery life. Every one of my friends who has an iPhone or a BlackBerry has had to buy some sort of clip on battery because the juice will otherwise run out in the middle of the afternoon.
The thing is the smart phone is not designed to be a phone. It’s designed to be a small computer held in the palm of the hand.
Which is fine, but don’t call it a smart phone then. It’s a dumb phone that can do smart Internet stuff.
It’s like one of those kids that can’t figure out how to clean their room but somehow get straight As in maths.
And this is the rub. What we’re seeing is a splitting of the ways, between smart phones and normal phones. The more we use smart phones, the less we’ll actually use them to talk to each other.
Indeed, this is already happening.
Japanese, for example, use their phones less and less for talking — 140 minutes a month, according to research company Frost and Sullivan. Compare that with Indians, who yack for about 400 minutes a month on their phone.
It’ll be some time before we see every Indian farmer wielding an iPhone, of course, but already Nokia sells phones that can do 3G — in other words, data at a decent speed — for about $110. Second hand, you could pick one up for about $30.
What’s holding users back isn’t the price of the phone: it’s the lack of network.
So what are we left with? Well, phones are getting so smart they’re not phones anymore. Not only in the sense that they do data, but that they don’t do the phone thing very well.
This will push usage further away from the chatting of old into the mobile phone being a mobile TV, a mobile Internet screen, pretty much a mobile everything except holding it up to your ear and chatting with someone.
I see a stark contrast between the Singaporean commuters on my bus, gazing into the glow of their smartphones, and the migrant workers from the subcontinent, chatting animatedly on their very basic cell phones on the same bus. They’re all paying the same fees, but their habits are different.
I’m not quite sure where that’s going to lead us. I’d like to think our face time with these smart devices is going to make us all smarter. Smart users, if you well. But like I said, the word doesn’t have a good history when you use it as a prefix.
News source:- http://www.thejakartapost.com
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