>Feature phone is a term typically used to describe a class of mobile phones that are still technically otherwise smartphones, besides their lack of highly advanced hardware and capabilities of modern ones. Feature phones tend to use an embedded operating system or real-time operating system with graphical user interface which are small and simple, unlike large and complex general-purpose mobile operating systems like Android or iOS, they typically provide voice calling and text messaging functionality in addition to basic multimedia and Internet capabilities and other services offered by the user's wireless service provider.
After that, the iPhone was clearly something qualitatively different, so people (or rather, journalists, phone stores and the like) started calling the old style “feature phones”.
I’d say it’s now misleading and even incorrect to call something a “smartphone” if it doesn’t have a full-size touchscreen.
All deserve to be called smart phones.
You don't misrecall. Even phones without a full keyboard like Nokia's N-series (e.g. the very popular N-70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N70) were considered smartphones.
If you're looking for a word to describe phones whose interface consists of a touchscreen with icons and gestures, I'd suggest "phablet".
When the iPhone launched, people called it a smartphone even though you couldn't install apps. Multitasking was also years away.
"Smartphone" has never meant anything really. Just marketing.
By your definition the original iPhone (3.5” screen) was a phablet.
It was, of course, absolutely bloody awful and didn't have even enough RAM to do the most basic things. But it was 3G and I had an unlimited plan that I tried to make the most of by watching videos etc on the go. I even used to use it as an MP3 player.
Exactly, "feature phones" were called that because of how the cell phone companies had to try to sell previous-generation phones in the same market as the iPhone. When other cell phone companies saw the iPhone, they realized the only way to present their phones as competitive was to frame the iPhone as a bundle of features (music player, web browser, games) and say hey, that's not so special, our phones do that stuff too. So you had flip or candy-bar phones that had an app for playing music, a terrible, crippled mobile web browser, maybe email, maybe a weather app, and some built-in games.
Calling these phones feature phones is a pretty awful knock, in other words. It means they aren't comparable to smart phones.
"Feature phones" were at one point the high end of a carrier's phone lineup, as they offered features, such as music playback, a camera, or WAP internet access, that a basic phone did not. Usually they could only run very limited applications, written in things like Java ME, that were available for sale through your cell carrier. When the iPhone was released, feature phones became the new low end. (Pre-iPhone smartphones were quite rare, usually being carried by on the go execs and the like.)
The boundary is fuzzy, sure, but the term usually means a phone where the app usage is front and center and phone usage is secondary.
Now these new phones might be somewhere in-between.
The only reference it has to how they're used talks about app usage "Now he listens to Bollywood music on the job, using Google’s built in voice assistant to search for Hindi-language tunes on YouTube. At night his family crowds around the device to watch movies."
They just lacked CPU power and RAM capacity compared to what came when the iPhone launched.
Models would be:
6600 6630 6680 N70 N73
I actually had another Symbian powered Smartphone when the iPhone launched, the Motorola Rizr Z8 which made the Nokia powered Symbian's at the time look really slow. I sort of miss that phone and it's form-factor, it even came with a pair of Stereo Bluetooth Headphones. Massively ahead of it's time, of course not as slick as the iPhone and AirPod combo I have now, but great in it's own way.
Those Symbian S60 Nokia phones you listed could install and run apps written in "C++". Emphasis on those quotes! But regardless, your very own native code, doing your bidding. Been there, done that.
It worked, but writing those apps was very tedious and hard. Everything was async to save power. No standard libraries, etc.
I'm very happy there's no need for "leave stack" and "cleanup stack" etc. in the modern world.
But damn, that architecture was really helping the battery to last for a long time. Your code simply would not be running until some async thing did a callback.
It did not make a big splash even among Linux enthusiasts, and vanished tracelessly as Android took over.
Only now, the type of a device you can call "an Internet pager" is truly finding its use again.
The irony is as the Internet becoming near ubiquitous, the less is the marginal value in having the latest and greatest device for using it. Most of what people use them now are IMs and digital wallets.
A lot of my coworkers are now settling with something even dumber for phone use, and use 7-8 inch tablet as the main mobile device: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32824383761.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
Or some go for things like this, a bluetooth remote for the main device that can access your address book and act as handsfree: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32839686717.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
Over the past decade, the term smartphone typically refers to a general purpose computing device that fits in your pocket that also acts as a phone. There is also more recently an implied requirement of a touch screen. A feature phone is more of an appliance device, where the primary feature is a phone, but it also has other limited features, some of which are internet enabled.
Unlike a smartphone, where you have a lot of control over what software you can put on it (similar to a PC), a feature phone only has a limited set of preinstalled features and optionally has a limited app store to add some more limited features.
By those definitions, the phones in the article are more feature phone than smartphone.
I used to develop apps and games on feature phones using Java MIDP, so 15 ago phones were already smartphones, there was just no app ecosystem back then nor real economy, that's all.
But it was possible to install 3rd party apps and even browsers like Opera Mobile on flip phones.
The difference is in the CPU power. Today some phones are more powerful than some cheap laptops.