there's no such thing as a "smartphone" anyway.

What? Explain yourself.

Actually, no. Casio has got an extensible lens package of a decent size. N8's optics are much more constrained and look more like a pinhole camera. As to processing photos, I doubt that Casio has more processing power than N8. Should be about the same, or slightly less.

He's right. They're all pocketable computers that happen to include cellular hardware and have special software for handling phone calls. The only reason people think of them as "smartphones" is because they share a similar formfactor and function as regular cellphones, but have large screens and do more.

Of course, the carriers and vendors are trying to trick us into thinking that they're not actually pocketable computers by crippling and controlling them.

try to give a definition of the term "smartphone" and you'll see how you run into trouble. if you cannot define what "smartphone" means, there's no point in calling things "smartphones".

Smartphone is just a marketing term that announces that this era of handheld devices are extensible devices with multi-purposed software and potential updates. It's as much marketing and technical jargon as "Web 2.0"...

Well, the definition used to be a device that can run "native" (as opposed to, say, J2ME) apps, but Android has muddied the waters a bit.

Oh. My. Puppy.

Stumbling across these posts from August and reading your interpretation of what I wrote is really annoying now.

What I said was that in these days, we don't see a discussion about which technology is best for a certain purpose (or for the intended target group). Nobody asks: If I can easily use this device with both resistive and capacitive, but capacitive has this one drawback while resistive has the other - honestly, which is more impportant to our customers, which one should we use?

Instead, the question Nokia and others face is: If engadget (or any other bloggers/tech-journalists) sees "resistive" on the press release, will they prepare their review of the device in advance based on the boilerplate texts they have for resistive screens? Will they even bother to try out the screen? Will they try to understand what group of consumers we had in mind when we designed the device and why we thought resistive was better for them? Or would this be beyond their intellectual capacity?

I call those bloggers and "journalists" uneducated because from what I gather, all they offer is opinions without expertise, without research, most importantly without actually using the device for longer than a week (which is what you really need for any kind of gadget). Somebody played with a prototype for 10mins and comments on the user interface and how it's inferior to the phone he currently owns because he didn't find a menu item in "settings", but in "options" ("So counter-intuitive!").

Yet, these "reviews" (read: opinions) are what consumers get what they want to read about their next phones. So if the choice you have is either doing what's technically best or doing what engadget wants to read in the press release, you better throw away the technically superior design and do what the self-proclaimed "experts" expect you to do. (Even though you know: If they really were experts, they'd have real jobs where they get paid for their expertise, not for their unfounded opinions.)

Android - and the iPhone before. Remember how the first iPhone was called a smartphone even though it couldn't run applications?

German Wikipedia a few months ago changed its definition of a smartphone to a weird nonsensical combination of "powerful" (define that!), "touchscreen" (so most E-Series phone aren't smartphones), "has GPS" (they lost me when they added this one),...

I'm 43 now and I read several definitions, starting from "has PIM functionality" to "can run applications" to "more than €500".
The €500 is probably it, but shows how absurd the word is. All other attempts (like "runs native applications", as you pointed out yourself) failed somehow, because bloggers and journalists (ha!) called phones smartphones even though they couldn't run native applications.

(I did like this "native applications" approach, btw, it seemed to be a reasonable distinction for me. But whenever I talk to iPhone/Android users, it turns out it isn't what they think defines a smartphone. They say it's a touch-screen and UI-transitions... Which makes me think of recent S40 touch-phones ... So it's probably best to just shrug and move on whenever people speak of smartphones.)

Heh.

Smartphone is what sells right now. Every phone manufacturer will bestow that 'title' to their top of the line product (read:flagship).