New Gadget 2011

That�s a harsh conclusion, I couldn�t agree more. But this conclusion is the result of my observation during my trip to several cities around the island, and it�s good to see how technology adopted in areas outside of the big cities.
You can see everyone�s using the so-called �smartphones� in big cities like Jakarta, Bandung and Jogjakarta and the rest of the smaller cities surrounding it are filled with the so-called �feature phones�. The smartphone category is filled with iPhone, Samsung/LG/Sony Ericsson Android-based phones and high-end Nokia while the feature phone category consists Nexian, Skybee, Huawei and other cheap devices.
So I tried really hard to make a sense of this separation, and I find it to be very shallow.

The current definition of smartphones according to Wikipedia : �� a high-end mobile phone. A smartphone combines the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone. Today�s models typically also serve as portable media players and camera phones with high-resolution touchscreens, web browsers that can access and properly display standard web pages rather than only mobile-optimized sites, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi and mobile broadband access.�
While feature phone defined as : � � is mobile phone that, like smartphones, combines the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone. Today�s models typically also serve as portable media players and camera phones with touchscreen, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi and mobile broadband access. Feature phones is the term generally used to describe low-end devices, with smartphone used to describe high-end devices, though there is no official definition to distinguish the two categories.The term originally referred to mobile phones with more features than other contemporary �dumb� mobile phones�
Nowadays, the distinction between a smartphone and a feature phone is very vague. A smartphone like iPhone or Android can have features WIFI, Bluetooth, third-party apps, cameras, GPS, social networking apps etc. What about feature phones? Guess what, they have exactly the same features as smartphone! Only in a much cheaper (and most likely weaker) hardware.
Smartphones could cost you hundreds of dollars, most of them are more than $200 while most feature-phones are cheaper than $150. Is this a fair distinction for smartphones and feature phones? Of course not. That would be the differentiation between low-end and high-end phones, not smart vs feature phones.
The differentiation wouldn�t be on the features or software, but mainly going to be on the hardware. Since the 70s, people see the future in software and slowly leaving hardware development as the potentially high-margin business, but there�s a possibility that hardware is back on trend.
In the future, I think the thin line between smartphones and feature phones will slowly disappear. There will be no such thing as a smartphone. There will be just .. phones.
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