Analysis: What is a smart phone?

Good question...

As the 3GSM show gets underway in Barcelona, Jo Best tries to tie down one of the buzziest terms in mobile.

According to the analysts, tens of millions of smart phones went flying off the shelves last year. Good news for the smart phone vendors - and possibly a little confusing for the rest of us. After all, how many of us are certain just what a smart phone is?

Is it just a flashy device that lets you watch a curtailed version of Eastenders or is it a business tool? Is it something to leave on your desk to impress colleagues and customers with during meetings? Can you count a BlackBerry as a smart phone? And, most importantly, what does having one mean for you?

Analyst house Gartner gives the definition of a smart phone as: "A large-screen, data-centric, handheld device designed to offer complete phone functions whilst simultaneously functioning as a personal digital assistant (PDA)."

Many industry watchers and device makers will take issue with the analyst's somewhat simplistic definition but for those supplying the smart bit of the smart phone, there's no doubt data applications are certainly one of the defining characteristics of the devices.

Jason Langridge, UK mobility business manager at Microsoft, says: "For us, smart phones combine traditional communication devices and provide rich applications and rich data applications."

Or, simply put, a feature phone can give you access to your email but a smart phone can sync it with your PC, your calendar - and the kitchen sink.

However, the definition of a smart phone is much deeper than simply running data apps - it goes to the core of the phone itself.

Smart phones, in fact, bear as much in common with PCs as with mobiles. The essence of the smart phone to many people is that it's programmable. Analyst house Ovum distinguishes a smart phone from a feature phone by its open operating system and the ability to freely add and remove applications.

Perhaps the most useful definition of the smart phone is that from the IT department - 'I know a smart phone when I see it'. It's a phone that executives ask their techies to set up and techies worry will end up lost in the back of a taxi, along with all of the sensitive data it holds.

Unlike most mobile phones, smart phones can be subject to malware. Admittedly, most viruses and worms around at the moment are reasonably benign as they require users to take some action.

For silicon.com's CIO Jury, security is certainly one of the defining factors of a smart phone.

CIO Jury member Nic Evans, European IT director of Key Equipment Finance, recently told us: "The smart phone is a management, support and security nightmare. There's the cost of media messages and 3G, the waste of time with Palmistas trying to get their PDAs to sync with their laptops, the security risk from carrying corporate databases around on a fashion accessory that screams 'steal me'."

Mark Edwards, CEO of device management company mFormation, says: "When you have an advanced device like a smart phone, you want to make sure that no one gets access to the information on it. We see more demand [for security] where people are running richer applications like push email."

And as more and more mobile applications are added to smart devices the question becomes more pertinent.

In the end, though, what does and doesn't constitute a smart phone is surely to be a relatively short-lived argument. Phones are getting ever smarter and it's only a matter of time before all phones have the advanced levels of functionality associated with today's smart phones.

History sets a precedent here. Back in 2000, when Symbian was a new kid on the block and Windows Mobile wasn't even conceived, the tag 'smart' was attached to the first ever Symbian phone, the Ericsson R380, which offered the usual smart data suspects - email, calendar, web (albeit WAP) access. It could even theoretically sync with your corporate email, although not in the smooth over-the-air way today's mobile emailers are used to.

Now, things have come full circle. The latest Sony Ericsson phone bears all the hallmarks of a smart phone yet won't be marketed as such, unlike the rest of its similarly functionality-heavy device family. The Japanese-Swedish venture is steering clear of the smart phone tag, branding the phone a 'messaging device'.

So, with even smart phone vendors shying away from the term, how are you supposed to know what's in your pocket?

David Wood, EVP at the largest smart phone operating system seller Symbian, says: "Smart phones differ from ordinary mobile phones in two fundamental ways: how they are built and what they can do. The way they're built - using open systems to take advantage of the skills, energy and innovation of numerous companies from a vast range of industries - means that smart phones extend the phenomenal track record of mobile phones by improving constantly and rapidly, year by year."

Wood's opinion sums up the two ways to define a smart phone and the two key groups that often need to define it: industry and users. For the industry and smart phone makers, it's all about the software - smart phone has a multitasking, programmable operating system which means users can alter and add to the phone's functionality.

For users, it's also a question of functionality - but seen through the other end of the telescope. The user sees the phone as having the latest business apps - mobile email, salesforce automation and supply chain management, for example - and the ability for those apps to sync with the software at corporate base camp. Thus the user's definition, stoked by the smart phone vendors, is constantly in flux and will almost certainly change based on the latest apps, the most up-to-date OS and the greatest functionality.

So, in short, if you think you have a smart phone, you probably do. And if you think that same phone will still be called a smart phone in two years, you're almost certainly wrong.