We agree. None of these are required parts of an operating system. Of course not. I said they're what makes a smartphone operating system. Not having copy&paste, multitasking and friends leaves you with a non-smart operating system.

Not really. An operating system is required for any application, built -in or third party, to access the phone's hardware, to start, to quit. That's the bare minimum. No "programs of [users] choice" here. Some phone operating systems don't give you much of a choice, they don't even have the concept of installable applications.

Also, it's wrong that anything beyond that qualifies as smart. Take Nokia's S40, for example. It can run applications, it even supports some basic multitasking for built-in applications... Is that enough of "anything beyond that" to make it a smartphone OS? No. Certainly not. Nor are the tricks WP7 can perform enough to make it a smartphone OS.

Services are nice if you really want them, but they have nothing to do with the OS you use and they don't make it smarter at all. Service integration is an application that sits on top of the OS, so you can have any service tied to any OS. Again, recent S40 phones have both Ovi- and non-Nokia services integrated nicely; still, this doesn't make S40 a smartphone OS. Nor does XBox integration make WP7 a smartphone OS.

On the contrary: Most everywhere "service integration" is an euphemism for vendor lock in. (Or does your XBox integration work with your Wii or PS3?) Vendor lock in is one of the things you want to escape by using a smartphone. For easy tasks like syncing contacts etc., some 'dumb' featurephones require you to either install an application provided by the manufacturer or use the manufacturer's cloud service. - A serious smartphone helps you break these chains and use whatever standard-compliant sync-mechanism you used before. It just drops in.


I agree. It sure isn't a smartphone. But it sure is in line what consumers want to buy. It's like the iPhone: Dumb as the Nokia C3, but more expensive and therefore desirable. Yes, this is the future of phones. Plain phones I'm no longer interested in, or else I would still use my (fully working) Nokia 6230.