We are not Smartphones

It really doesn’t. It’s occurred to me that the little slab of plastic, glass and stainless steel that lives in my pocket is not a Smartphone.

After taking a little walk in to some phone shops over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the trend of ‘one-upsmanship’ in the Android phone spec war to be hurtling along with no sign of slowing. After looking over HTC’s latest offerings and the impeding arrival of Samsung’s latest ‘it’s not an iPhone’ line, the Galaxy S3, landing this week. It’s easy to confuse the specs of these devices with laptops. Quad core processors, gigabytes of RAM, dedicated graphics, high resolution displays. They are little computers. But then they are cameras! with 8, 21 and 41 mega-pixel cameras, shooting 1080i footage that can then be edited on the device and uploaded from anywhere (with a decent 3G connection – of 4G if you’re lucky in some parts of the world).

And that’s just the hardware. What about Apps? (Short for Applications, I’ve had to explain that to more than a few people). These little bundles of code turn our silicone slivers in to a never ending array of different things. The Internet on these devices and lest we forget games. The modern iOS and Android devices have brought us a revolution in mobile gaming unseen since the GameBoy!

Music, movies, camera, virtual assistants, constantly up to date atlases, portals to every piece of public information stored digitally and so much more! Does calling that a ‘Smart Telephone’ seem accurate. Ask yourself, how much time do you spend on your device on phone calls and how much time you spend on it doing everything else. I’d call it a safe bet that many people are or at least soon will be of the same thinking that the ability to make a call is not the primary function of these devices but being the hubs to our lives is. It’s for that reason I feel these devices need a more fitting term.

So, what is that term?

I have no idea. Yes, I’m a marketing man and I can reel off a number of suggestions off the top of my head:

  • Pocket Portal
  • Life Hub
  • Internet Window
  • Omni Phone
  • Data Core
  • Share Stream

But nothing like that seems right. Thus, I open this up, perhaps together we can think of something more suitable than using the short hand term for a 100 year old piece of technology.

Update
I think I may have a good option, so from now on I shall be referring to mine and everyone else’s smartphones as Communicator.