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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

They are feature phones.

>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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone

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OK, so from that, they are smartphones, just low-end ones which probably isn't software-compatible with higher end smartphones.

Yes, unless I completely misrecall, these were called “smartphones” before the iPhone launched.

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.

> Yes, unless I completely misrecall, these were called “smartphones” before the iPhone launched.

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.

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”.

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.

They were called smartphones even after the iPhone launch until the iOS v. Android duopoly was established.

You’re right, before Android took off, it was just “iPhone”.

I think before iPhone, feature phones were the ones that only run J2ME apps/games. Smartphones were; Symbian, Maemo.

Maemo was comparable or better than ios at that time...

And (the original) Windows Mobile.

That's fascinating how people forget about (the original) Windows Mobile that had 42% of U.S. smartphone market share in 2007.

Can't agree with that - many early androids, the original and current android Blackberry (key2?) are all smartphones, but have or had a keyboard. There's also a selection of crazy expensive Far East smart flip phones with Motorola Razr form factor.

All deserve to be called smart phones.

"Smartphone" was originally a Microsoft coinage intended to refer to devices running Windows Mobile, which were in many ways closer to modern smartphones than to feature phones: they had large (for the day) touch screens, could run sophisticated apps like a Web browser or a cut down version of Office, etc.

"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.)

Yeah, I had a Nokia 6680 back in 2005 that was classed as smartphone (Symbian after all was a Smartphone OS).

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.

Which brings another point: the jio phone is orders of magnitude better than the deaths phones available the last time feature phones were big in the US or Europe.

As I understood it, the key difference was being able to add functionality by installing third-party applications. That's what made a smartphone "smart", as opposed to a featurephone which was stuck with only the "features" implemented by the manufacturer.

If you're looking for a word to describe phones whose interface consists of a touchscreen with icons and gestures, I'd suggest "phablet".

Most feature phones of the era could install J2ME apps, which had pretty deep APIs (including GPS, hardware 3D graphics, Bluetooth, camera, filesystem, J2ME live wallpapers etc) and on higher-end feature phones could be multitasked.

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.

Phablet means something distinctly different; it’s a phone that’s so large that it’s verging in being a tablet. Usually thing means a between 5” and 6” screen.

By your definition the original iPhone (3.5” screen) was a phablet.

Yes, but the size people see as phablet has changed over time. It's basically a size larger than the average person is comfortable with as a phone. Yes, it used to be 5-6", but now it is more in the 6-7.5" range, largely due to the shrinking of bezels allowing larger screens in the same physical size phone.

Virtually all pre-iphone featurephones could install third-party Java apps.

And Symbian and Windows CE apps.

yes, it's simply a change in terminology - they're pretty far from the old days of nokia devices running very close to the hardware

Smart phones grew out of feature phones. Marketers needed a new name to differentiate them.

Goalposts are truly moving over time. Perhaps devices similar to current gen iPhones and Android phones aren't considered smart phones in 20 years.

That's hilarious, because a family member owns a feature phone (a small flip phone) that runs Android under the hood

nowadays almost everything is android https://hackaday.com/2019/04/29/bike-computer-exploration-un...

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