Nokia sent out a bit of developer news a few weeks ago that caught our attention: ‘Introducing the Nokia C7 Astound, a Symbian Smartphone for the U.S. Market.’ This confused us for a few reasons. First, we had previously reported in February that Symbian was a dead OS and mobile application development platform. This is primarily due to its partnership with Microsoft and utilizing Windows Phone 7® (and the mobile app development platform) as its primary force in the Smartphone game.

Second, there has been quite the debate in the developer community about Symbian being a ‘Smart’ platform or not. This made us want to dig on the issue a little deeper and find out: What actually makes a smartphone ‘Smart?’ Is it simply a marketing term or is there a technical line between ‘Smartphone’ and ‘Average Phone’ (or as we like to call them, ‘Mediocre Phones’).

Let’s delve into the issue a bit.

Brief History of Time: Smartphones Edition

Though our friend Steve Jobs and Apple® really catapulted the smartphone and application development phenomena we now know, it was really built on a framework of other products from many companies. Everybody remembers Palm Pilots right? How long ago they seem. According to the Smartphone wiki, Palm®, Symbian, BlackBerry® and Windows Phones were truly the first smartphones available. It’s likely that in the late 90’s technology companies realized they could merge the technology from PDA’s and regular cellular telephones to create a product that was even better and more functional for business users.

In 2002, Handspring was the first to release a smartphone: The Palm OS Treo. The Treo featured email capabilities and allowed 3rd party development (though the SDK wasn’t as widely distributed as it is nowadays). Windows Phone and BlackBerry were not far behind, and BlackBerry as a device enjoyed quite a nice reign until the summer of 2007 with the release of the first generation iPhone™.

So what makes a Smartphone ‘Smart?’

Though it is probably taken over by many marketing departments to describe phones with superior technology, the determination of ‘Smart’ really comes down to a few key factors:

Allows user advanced customization – Smartphones allow users to customize their phone, pretty much in every way. Users control the look of their phone, the set-up and the applications that allow them to best leverage the device. This customization and personalization hinges a lot on the marketplace for mobile applications, giving users the ability to find any mobile app that best suits their needs.

3rd Party Development Platforms – This is pretty critical to the idea of a smartphone, because opening up the platform for mobile app development means more opportunities for consumers to find what they want. Smartphone companies release their SDK to software application developers in order to create custom mobile applications. In a sense it’s a form of crowd sourcing.

Emulates a PC Environment – Smartphones are designed to be a micro-version of your personal computer, but in somewhat of a limited capacity. This means that you have access to the critical elements of many applications, but not the entire set of features you might find on the full application.

Sadly, Nokia’s Symbian platform does appear to be dying a slow death. According to the Symbian wiki, as of April 5, 2011 Symbian was scaling down its development teams to be quite small and work almost exclusively through carriers in Japan. It seems (and this is pure conjecture) that the Nokia C7 Astound was in production and planned for release long before Nokia made its decision to go Windows. There might be other phones that were in production that are soon-to-be-released, we’ll have to wait and see. However, after investigation I believe we can conclude that not only was Symbian a ‘Smart’ platform, it may have in-part paved the way for the current mobile app development and smartphone market today.

For more information about Mobile Application Development and Custom Software Development services that Amadeus Consulting provides, please feel free to contact us at AmadeusConsulting.com.