Mobile phone sales down in 2009, Chrome barely edges Safari - Page 2

Well like I say, if that is what he meant, that is what he should have said, not you trying to say what you think he meant.

"want" is not a metric of value, and trying to use it to predict anything is, shall I say, dumb.

The point of my observation is that most people prefer a phone with well-implemented features. I don't know anyone who prefers a different kind, i.e., a "dumb" phone (which, once again, I will put in quotes, so it will be perfectly clear that I wasn't referring to everything that we don't currently call a smartphone). A lot of "dumb" phones have some fairly advanced features, they are just so badly done that hardly anyone uses them.

The primary problem with the "smartphone" category is that for a long time it was populated with devices with poorly implemented advanced features. This greatly reduced the audience for them, restricting their popularity to those who either have enough need for the features to overcome their basic clumsiness, and/or people who are geeky enough to want to use them.

I didn't think it was overly controversial to suggest that the iPhone has gone a long way towards erasing the line between what we've been calling "smartphones" and the rest of the mobile phone market. IMO, the audience for the iPhone is not just the people who were buying smartphones before the iPhone. It seems to be a much broader audience, including a lot of people who were stuck using "dumb" phones before, not because they have no desire for the advanced features, but because before the iPhone these features were so poorly implemented. That's why I prefer to look at Apple's share of the worldwide mobile phone market, rather than their share of the increasingly irrelevant smartphone category.

I will also take a not-so-wild stab at the future and suggest that in a few years, most phones will have features that are considered advanced today. Email and web access will be considered standard features, just as texting is today. The company which figures out how to deliver this, wins big.

You two talking about how dumb you are is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

I agree with that. ARM processors today will be standard free phone processors one day with more than enough power to run a robust mobile browser like WebKit. We may even have a system like Dragon Dictation that can send your voice to a server, translate with accuracy by learning your speech patterns and usage history, and come back with full text for your websites and other apps for simple flip phones.

I assume Apple will eventually push to smaller and simpler devices, like the iPod Mini/Nano, once the have saturated the high-end market. Weve already seen a drop to a slightly lower end with the continuation of the 3G model, but we have not seen a separate model. With this segment growing it may be awhile before that becomes necessary. If/When it does I dont think it will utilize the same App Store, perhaps no App Store. Just a slick phone, at first, with a great iPod built in.

Have you seen the last dozen spam posts in this thread?

This thread is kinda like an archive of spam.

Yeah, I've reported it. It seems like a new breed of spammers have found a technique for bypassing any filtering. The spamming lately has been getting bad.....again.

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me.

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