Yesterday I talked about how the word ‘smartphone’ is becoming more and more confusing because there seems to be 1) no definitive explanation of what one is 2) it is purely objective; me smartphone could be your feature phone and 3) did we ever really know?

There are some supposedly official explanations on the web such as- "A smartphone is a mobile phone offering advanced capabilities beyond a typical mobile phone, often with PC-like functionality. There is no industry standard definition of a smartphone. For some, a smartphone is a phone that runs complete operating system software providing a standardized interface and platform for application developers. For others, a smartphone is simply a phone with advanced features." So, that explanation does not help at all.

I promised a review of the Sony Ericsson W890i yesterday and here I will explain how this consumer centric phone can do almost everything a typical smartphone (whatever that is?) can do.

Email

After setting the W890i up with a few contacts, I decided to have a hunt around the menus and found an option called ‘Synchronisation’. I didn’t expect much, but was very surprised to find that MS Exchange support was included out of the box. The process for setting up the account was very easy and within one minute I was up and running. The first synchronisation took a little while, but after that it has worked just as well as any Windows Mobile or Symbian device I have used. Push email works perfectly as well and the entire experience is smooth and professional. I now have all 2000 contacts and 6 months worth of calendar entries in this phone. This feature is not mentioned at all on the official Sony Ericsson page for this phone.

Calendar / Contacts

Obviously we are dealing with a small screen here and the fonts used by the W890i are quite large, but in the Calendar application you can add notes, reoccurrences and all of the other standard options to a new appointment. There are day, week and month views which work well and this also reminds me very much of the standard smartphone calendar experience.

Contacts are as standard as you would expect from any feature phone and all of the standard extras are included such as specified ring tones for each contact, pictures, Birthdays and notes. Finding a contact is as easy as typing the first few letters and away you go. Again, all very quick and easy to use.

Data Entry

I will choose to compare this to smartphones such as the Nokia N95 and HP iPAQ 614c which both have standard numeric keyboards. QWERTY keyboarded devices will always win in the data entry stakes, but T9 is not as slow as I remember it being. It needs practice, but I am almost starting to like it. It will never replace a full QWERTY keyboard for me, but it is not half bad. The keys are just as finger friendly as a smartphone with a numeric keypad and the extras such as word completion and even punctuation guessing really do help with quick data entry.

Call Quality

Very good. The standard call quality is clear and has a deep tone, but the speaker phone is particularly poor. Actually it is barely worth including because it is so bad!

Music and Video

This is a Walkman badged phone so you can expect an above par audio experience. The W890i is supplied with a headphone adaptor which accepts all 3.5mm jacked headphones. With a good quality set of headphones attached, the music playback quality is excellent and close to iPod quality. The interface is also quite smart and novelty features like SenseMe add further to the experience. Video playback is also very smooth and clear, but the small screen size obviously reduces the overall experience to little more than a feature purely for watching short clips and home videos.

Camera

The inclusion of a 3.2MP camera on a Sony Ericsson phone should produce acceptable photographic results and most shots display clearly even on a PC. Indoor shots are not great and the lack of auto focus is a disappointment.

Battery

I managed five days of average use during which time I had push email running 24/7 and completed just over 2.5 hours of calls. Find me a smartphone that can compete with that…

Conclusion

It became clear to me that the W890i is not a million miles away from the majority of smartphones in terms of functionality. The way these features are used represents the main differences between a feature phone and smartphone, but in some cases even the hardware is similar.

There are some definite advantages to using a feature phone for organisation and email such as better battery life and clearer screen clarity. These two features alone make for a much more practical experience and one that allows you to use the phone in many more situations. The realisation that the W890i is in fact almost as capable as my i780, and better in some areas, was a revelation to me. Here is a quick comparison to demonstrate the similarities-

The Samsung has obvious advantages for the business arena and the included GPS and Wi-Fi are devilishly important, but the general functionality is quite similar. Maybe it is my ignorance of feature phones, but it appears that the gap between all of these phones is now very small indeed and it will become increasingly difficult to choose between them.

Taking this comparison a step further, I took a look at the Sony Ericsson W910i (£180) and K770i (£100). They share the MS Exchange support, but the K770i offers an auto-focus camera and the W910i feels quite similar to a smartphone with its large screen and easy to use buttons. As I played with these two phones, I became truly convinced that feature phones are a LOT more usable than I have realised previously. The price differential is also very great with the K770 dropping in at a meagre £100.

This leaves webmasters and many others in the smartphone media industry with a problem. Do we compartmentalise ourselves to covering specific mobile operating systems like Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian or do we own up to the fact that almost any phone over £100 is a smartphone. As more Java applications and good quality Java games are released, the potential for flexibility is close to what we expect from what we believe to be smartphones.

We are in an unusual position at the moment in that the boundaries in the mobile market are fast disappearing. Part of me does not want to admit that there are now many more smartphones on the market than before because they would be impossible to cover!

June 27, 2008 - VITO Technology releases a new version of FunContact - the best selling contact manager that provides the most exciting and convenient contact management on Windows Mobile touch screen devices. You can do everything with a flick of a finger!

FunContact 2.15 presents two major new features: a new black skin like in the recently released ZoomBoard and SMS-Chat, and also joystick support. The black skin fits perfectly brand-new Windows Mobile devices hitting the market like HTC Diamond, TyTN II, Touch Pro and all other devices from Touch series as they all have dim color theme.

The original "fun" skin is still available and allows even serious businessmen to take their ease on vacation and relax. After all your wife is not going to believe you are actually updating your contacts or looking thru the call history even if she notices the sliding screens with exciting animation and bright colors. She might want to have a play with it though, so beware.

Joystick support has been the outcry from our customers since FunContact was released. New FunContact gives you the choice: you can scroll the list with a finger or with a joystick. Both variants are very convenient, and though the main idea of FunContact is to manage contacts with finger, some FunContact users addicted to joystick now can also benefit by performing all the basic operations in FunContact like calling, texting ,etc. with joystick.

FunContact is available for $19.95 at  http://iwindowsmobile.com/contact-manager.html. FunContact supports English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.

The Swedish manufacturer of carrying cases for portable electronics, Krusell, has released their "Top 10"-list for June 2008. The list is based upon the number of pieces of model specific mobile and smart phone cases that have been ordered from Krusell during June 2008.

Krusell's list is unique due to the fact that it reflects the sales of phones on six continents and in more than 50 countries around the globe. Read the full list at cellular news.

Here's an interesting story- adults allowed to ue phones in a car, but not 16 and 17 year olds?

To Celeste Tyler and her teenage friends, text-messaging is as effortless as tying their shoes.
 
The high school senior can text without looking, sending messages on her red Samsung "slider" while it's behind her back, in her purse or under her desk at school, where cell phones are banned.

So why not do it while driving?

Well, now the law. A state rule that takes effect Tuesday prohibits 16- and 17-year-olds from using any device to talk or text while driving, except in an emergency.

A companion law allows adults to continue chatting away, but says they must use a hands-free device while driving.

And that's just not fair, Tyler said.

"I've seen a lot of adult drivers that are way more irresponsible than my friends with licenses," said the 17-year-old, who is studying for her license. "People over 28 don't know how to use their phones very well."

Most teenagers rarely talk on their cell phones, she said, preferring text and instant messaging instead.

Texting is not specifically prohibited in the law for those 18 and older, but law enforcement officials say it's generally covered under statutes aimed at distracted drivers. More at Yahoo.