Smartphones - smart?

[Hugo Roy]

Hello,

TL;DR: we shouldn’t use the term smartphones but instead simply
refer to mobiles (or mobile devices).

You may have seen it on FSFE’s last newsletter (coming to
non-fellows soon) or on some other materials. Sometimes we use the
term “smartphone” to indicate mobile computers that we carry
around us and that we can use to phone, text, email, get spied
on, play, etc.

I don’t know how you feel about the term, but we can agree that
it’s just a marketing invention. What’s wrong with you if you
haven’t got a smartphone: maybe you’re just dumb, right?

I feel we should restrain from using this marketing term.
Especially, I think it’s misleading to say that the phone is smart
or for smart people. Moreover, the way these phones operating
systems are designed by contrast to classic operating systems,
they are actually less “smart”: the interesting computation does
not happen on the device itself, but on the
Google/Apple/Amazon/etc. server.

I also think that it’s not accurate to call these phones any more,
since they’re a lot more. So I suggest we just use the term
"mobiles" or "mobile devices".

Best,


-- 
Hugo Roy, Free Software Foundation Europe, <www.fsfe.org> 
Deputy Coordinator, FSFE Legal Team, <www.fsfe.org/legal> 
Coordinator, FSFE French Team, <www.fsfe.org/fr> 
 
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