Smartphones - smart?

[Hugo Roy]

↪ 2014-07-04 Fri 14:40, Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.com.au>:
> > 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
> 
> Not quite - I think it serves to differentiate phones that can run apps
> from those that only act as firmware
> 
> In other words, a smartphone is a basic phone + a PDA/pocket computer

I think you’re missing the point of the discussion. I know what a
smartphone refers to the object you describes, but that’s not what
the term smartphone means in itself. Smartphone is a combination
of “smart” and “phone” and there’s no denying that this
combination is pure marketing. Another illustration of this is how
new objects are being sold with “smart” in front of it: Smart Tv,
Smar fridge, smart fork and whatnot.


> > 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.
> 
> This, too, is not universally true. Many good apps do run entirely
> within the phone and they deserve more recognition.

It does not invalidate the premise that the operating system is
not designed to run autonomously. We have to put a lot of efforts
into modifying it so that it’s true.

A good example is the recent development of Google Play Services
and the Google Cloud Messenging (sic?) layers that are proprietary
and connected and on which more and more Android Apps have to rely
on.

The object that’s marketed as the “smartphone” is sold; not what
you are doing with it as a free software hacker ;-)


> > 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".
> 
> Personally, I prefer to hear somebody say smartphone when they would
> otherwise say something worse, like iPhone

At least calling an iPhone an iPhone is accurate and noone’s
fooled that it’s a marketing brand.

> I also look forward to the day when people say tablet instead of iPad.
> Amongst other things, a growing number of people never take tablet
> devices out of their bag at an airport if the sign only tells people to
> remove iPads and laptops from their bags.

That’s not a huge problem. 

In FSFE, we’re not going to refer to tablets as "iPad", we just
say "tablet" and people understand what that means. I’m just
suggesting that for the smaller-than-tablets devices, we use
accurate terms like "mobiles" instead of "smartphones".


-- 
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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