A bit more than seven years ago, most people used feature phones, a few used some other not so smart thing called handhelds, the most popular: Palm, HP IPaq, and of course, blackberry they were expensive, the mobile internet was bad at that time and of course, you can’t install apps on those things.

Then the smartphones era became true, although there may be a few attempts before, the true star and the one that deserves the credit here is the iPhone, a mobile device that sucks too, you couldn’t install apps and the original intention was to use web apps, but it make using email, browsing, using a contact list, taking pictures and listening to music in a mobile device a charm. (Sorry Nokia, your NXXX weren’t that good).

So, phones became “smart” and by smart I meant they let you do more things with the software.

Now you can install a ton of apps, you can have thousands of songs, pictures or videos, the apps let you edit pictures, watch entire movies, draw/paint and browse internet in a way seven years ago was impossible, and still, smartphones are getting back to be feature phones.

Why feature phones, because if you remember, seven years ago, when you were at the phone house buying a cell phone, you were buying it because of how it looks like, how big the screen it was, how good the camera was, did it included a pair of headphones?, what made you buy a phone was the hardware, not the software. The same thing is happening,

You get a Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, Apple phone, all of them let you do the same thing, so, you buy one or the other because this looks prettier than those, this have a bigger screen, this one is pink and I like pink. A smartphone is no longer identified by its software capabilities.

So, in my opinion what can make a smartphone again a smartphone?, It’s hard to tell, I could say that not the hardware but the software, that the software needs to do something more than what we are used to. Siri, Cortana and Google now are good examples of what makes “smart” a smartphone, but they are available on almost all phones, and the vast majority just ignore them.

Smartphones are doomed, they are not smart, they are just another (bad,reduced) computer, they are just a feature phone.