if connected

Orange are promoting social networking and Internet access on pre pay so-called ‘featurephones’ (see photo on the right). Consumers care about what their phones can do not what artificial term the mobile industry chooses. No one can define the term ‘smartphone’ unambigously and no one defines ‘smartphone’ the same as anyone else. It’s meaningless.

On various briefing calls yesterday Nokia defended their (tenuous) position in high end phones by repeatedly claiming to be the leading maker of ‘smartphones’ — but 45% of a non-existent category is a useless metric. Consumers certainly don’t get it: Series 60 (“smart”) and Series 40 (not, ‘featurephone’) look virtually identical on the surface, and neither looks comparable in their online abilities compared with Android, iPhone, Palm, the INQ1 or even Windows Mobile.

Instead, what matters is how good phones are at doing the Internet or for Facebook. Everyone must focus on ‘Internet phones’ in developing mobile strategy or mobile phone marketing.

Orange’s in-store Internet-centric messaging is strong, but they are missing a trick with their online store as there’s no option there to filter phones by features such as ‘Facebook’ or ‘Internet’.

Update Friday, August 14 – See this Forrester report by me for more on “smartphones”: The “Smartphone” Is Dead: Long Live Smart Phones And Smart Gadgets