I’ve just played Angry Birds. On a candy bar phone. A Series 40 candy bar phone.
Today, Nokia didn’t just join the Windows Phone brigade: it killed off the term “smartphone” once and for all. And I for one, couldn’t be happier.
We’ve been heading this way for a while, but Rovio porting its smash avian hit to the world’s most undemanding mobile phone platform sealed it. The word “smartphone” is now entirely devoid of meaning.
Think about it for a second. What does smartphone mean? The word is two decades old. At first, it was anything which had more than a 0-9 numberpad. Then it was something that could do email. Then it was something that could run third party applications. Then it was just the more expensive phones on the market, and a wave of super cheap, super efficient Android phones soon shifted the semantic goal posts once again.
By any of those definitions, the Nokia Asha 303, unveiled at Nokia World today is a smartphone. It has a 2.6-inch capacitive touchscreen, a QWERTY keyboard, and even a 1GHz processor powering it. And it only costs £100 unlocked – a rarity in emerging markets for something so powerful.
And yet it runs Series 40, which previously was only good for playing music and loading a WAP page if you really, really needed to. But in the last year, even while Nokia has washed its hands of Symbian, it’s added more and more impressive services to S40: it now runs WhatsApp, so you can instant message your buddies on Android, iPhone, Windows Phone and BlackBerry (Also once deemed smartphones); it now runs Nokia Maps with turn by turn directions and pre-loaded maps, so data use is kept to a minimum; it now runs Angry Birds.
During this morning’s opening keynote at Nokia World 2011 at the Excel Centre in London’s docklands, it wasn’t CEO Stephen Elop who wowed the crowd: it was his dumbphone lieutenant, vice-president of mobile phone marketing Bianca Juti.
She danced on stage, she regaled the crowd with stories of growing up in Mexico, where she said only one in ten families had a phone, she showed just what an S40 phone can do. Anything pretty much – with the right cloud services to back it up, it’s just a question of fewer pixels.
And the boundary is blurring rapidly at the top end too. Apple is selling iPhones at cheaper and cheaper prices, Android is on everything from £70 phones to £1,000 tablets – and then there’s Windows Phone. Right from the start, Microsoft has badged it up as a “people” centric phone: it may sound like marketing jingoism, but it’s a fair description of its live tiles and heavy emphasis on account syncing with as many social networks as possible.
It too, can do everything: it just needs the app developers to make that happen, and if anything can make that happen, it’s the effervescent Nokia Lumia 800.
So let’s stop using the word “smartphone”. Let’s change the conversation. It’s no longer about smartphones versus dumbphones, power versus battery life, or any other old paradigms. Every phone is a smartphone now – or it should be.
“We can bring data to people who have never had it before,” Juti promised as she left the stage this morning. She wasn’t just talking kilobytes and HSPA: she meant the right information, in the right context, at the right cost. Nokia’s rivals would do well to note that: if they can’t deliver that on their most expensive flagship phone and their bargain bin blowers, they might as well give up now.
(via Nokia Conversations)
