Smartphones - smart?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 04/07/14 15:42, Hugo Roy wrote:
> ↪ 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.

Ok, so "smart" is convenient marketing but if we want to refer to such a
phone, as distinct from a legacy mobile, just using the word "mobile"
may not be sufficient

Is there any other terms that could be used?

>
>>> 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 agree that is a disturbing trend and it is not something that anybody
should be comfortable with. I'm not trying to deny that at all.

>>> 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.

Not quite what I was getting at - many people are actually using the
term iPhone to refer to any type of smartphone and this appears to be
worse than using the term smartphone