I’m a tad tired of the catchall phrase “smartphone”. There is no way all Androids and Blackberries can be classified as smartphones, and yet everything gets lumped together for the purposes of stats.
Luckily, I bumped in Jaco Loubser recently and he gave me a definition I buy:
1. A touch screen
No touch screen = feature phone.
2. An open development environment
This means that there are few limits placed on developers with regards to what type of applications they can develop and which parts of the handset’s functionality they can access.
3. Endless resources
Ok, endless may be pushing it a bit. What I meant was that there are enough resources (low cost & fast bandwidth, processing power, memory, available storage space) that developers can primarily focus on their application ideas instead of constantly having to worry about resource constraints, so its more a case of ‘enough’ instead of ‘endless’.