Re: Dumbing Down Smartphones
 

ARJWright… Nice article. I would like to suggest that the smart phone definition needs a specific OS based requirement and humbly offer you this explanation. Humans have used their intellect to create technical analogs to what we know. Cars are analogs of horses, greater speed, endurance and range. Telephones are an analog to our voices, leveraged and expanded to cover greater distance. Computers are analogs to a larger human system, cognition, perception and communication.

The smart phone is the branching of the computer as human analog, in a portable format. One of the key aspects of human intellectual activity is mutli-tasking and multi-threading of perception (input), cognition (processing) and communication (output).

The inability of a device to "act" like a human – process multiple perception streams, act on them, synthesize the streams into cogent communication precludes it from being a smart phone.

Today's most iconic smart phone, the iPhone, is a feature phone and not a smart phone. Having a rich "eco system" does not increase the depth of the device, just it's breath.

You are astute in specifying that "Operating systems that do not allow developers to access APIs to extend mobile functionality through third-party software would have to be considered closed, and therefore devices running them would be nothing more than featurephones." But I would add that openness in some cases is not a function of the platform, but the owners of that platform.

"…that application also takes advantages of hardware and software features specific to that device to enhance the mobile experience."

In the end I think that one of the quickest tests of a device as smart phone vs. feature phone is that the OS and applications deliver multi tasking and multi threading to applications that range from the mundane(PIM) to the sublime(augmented reality) and allow for the interaction between all data on the device (with the understanding of course that if follows the premise of portability and wireless connectivity).

Re: Dumbing Down Smartphones
 

And I guess that's the point. The N900 is one among potentially many devices.

Since I'm typing this on my OQO with an embedded 3G radio (Sprint), I can say that a pocketable computer with cellular data is a great device. Adding voice capability would make it a phone and computer combination but it would be huge compared to most phones.

OTOH, taking a PDA or PMP and adding voice and data capability to it, like the Palm TX > Palm Treo > Palm Pre or the iPod Touch > iPhone or the N810 > N900 doesn't suddenly make the device a computer and a phone. It makes it a smart phone (which is not a bad thing). They are just too limited compared to other, available pocketable computers to be considered computers.