What is the difference between feature phone and smartphone

Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research, points out that there are still close to million feature phone users in India and the transition to smartphones will happen over a period of time. Also many users are not comfortable with the touch phones while others are driven by factors like age, the need for a secondary device and limited user requirements like calling have kept the market buzzing.

Factors like digital detoxing, too, has swayed many towards features phones and allowed them to cut down the time spent on social media, and avoid isolating themselves from their family, friends and work.

Feature phones are less distracting when compared to smartphones that can run games like PUBG or stream videos from YouTube. With the advent of smart feature phones like Jio Phone 2 and Nokia which offer 4G speeds and support WhatsApp, users can do more even on feature phones.

This has made them the go-to option between a feature phone and a decent Android smartphone. Also, the fact that these smart feature phones cost a lot less than an entry-level smartphone adds to their appeal. Platforms with KaiOS have been built for basic users and come with simple and easy to understand interface with hardly any bloatware unlike Android OS, which is largely the same even on entry-level smartphones and can be quite confusing to first-time users.

Many of the elements of smartphones are wasted on users with limited requirements. It can be due to lack of exposure to digital services, affordability and use case. In many areas, power charging is also an issue so people use feature phones that serve them for longer periods," says Faisal Kawoosa, founder and chief analyst at TechArc. That said, smartphones have improved significantly and one can do so much more on them, but a large demographic of users in India are not ready for them.

The UI and the apps must be built in something else, which we're assuming is a cut-down version of S40 — or possibly even a derivative of the near defunct S It's clearly a featurephone, as there's no third-party software development and no app store — but by adding social apps and a cloud-accelerated browser, it's clear that featurephones are no longer just phones that make calls and send texts and have a game or two to keep you occupied.

Higher up the scale sits another Nokia range, its Asha phones. They're still classed as featurephones, but with touchscreens with reasonable resolution, they're on a par with the original iPhone. But there's one big difference between the Asha and the old featurephone model which leaves the phone the same the day your contract ran out as the day you bought it: Asha gets upgrades.

It's an odd combination: a featurephone with some smartphone capabilities. So we probably shouldn't be surprised that some high-end Ashas are being marketed as smartphones — especially when they're being sold in markets that are being targeted by locally developed Android devices from companies such as Karbonn.

It runs Android apps so it must be a smartphone, right? Nokia sold vast amounts of Symbian phones and they were technically smartphones, because you could install extra apps on them. But in practice, most people installed only one or two extra apps on their Symbian devices. They bought them to make calls, send texts, take photos, play games, listen to music, maybe look at a map and do some web searches — and they picked them because they were cheap. It's a market BlackBerry used to do well in with its pre-pay phones.

Sold on a family plan so you got two for the price of one and with a great keyboard for texting on, plus free messaging with BBM, they were great value. They were built with features like dual-SIM, and made with last year's processor for a much lower cost and in much higher volume. If you're a heavy smartphone user, you have a tiny computer in your pocket that brings you the web and Twitter, summons your Uber ride, lets you share a Secret, record Vines, edit documents, book hotels, track flights, listen to Pandora, crush candy, destroy pigs and birds alike, fly quadricopters and drive robot balls, and continually try out the latest new app.

We also include the BlackBerry and the iPhone in this, because those operating systems run on more than one device It's admittedly no longer a "third-party" OS in that case, but they do exist outside of just one device. Beyond that, smartphones are also defined by the ability to run third-party software, typically known as applications or "apps. These apps are often integral to the smartphone experience, and most people with smartphones end up getting at least a handful of third-party apps to make the device more useful.

E-mail is a necessary feature component, as is access to corporate push e-mail, since smartphones are usually marketed toward business professionals. By the same token, calendar syncing and document editing are essential as well. Feature phones, on the other hand, are a midway point between smartphones and basic phones. They usually have a limited proprietary operating system, and not all feature phones support third-party software.

If they do, they're usually run on Java or BREW and are often standalone items that don't integrate with other features of the phone.

While e-mail is usually an included feature, you often have to pay extra for it, or you have to access your e-mail via the mobile browser. Push email is often nonexistent.

You can get corporate e-mail on some feature phones, but the experience is usually far slower and not as smooth. Calendar syncing is often a problem, as is document editing. However, feature phones make up for that with a big focus on multimedia and texting, and almost all feature phones have GPS, full HTML browsers, and 3G speeds.

A lot of feature phones also have popular social networking abilities now; Twitter and Facebook integration is especially popular. Seeing as feature phones are so much more limited, what are the advantages of having a feature phone over a smartphone?

If you don't feel the need for corporate syncing or third-party apps, getting a feature phone might be a more affordable middle-ground. You might think that you will get all the benefits of a mobile multimedia device without the extra premium cost of owning a smartphone Though this is changing; see below.

Some people also feel that feature phones are easier to use, and that smartphones are too complicated. And while it's not as prevalent, there could also be a social stigma associated with owning a smartphone--perhaps there's a stodgy corporate suit image, especially with BlackBerrys. But today, the differences are no longer so clear-cut. Now that most if not all smartphones have strong multimedia capabilities, the corporate suit image is largely outdated.

More smartphone companies are focusing on consumers rather than just the enterprise. Android phones like the Motorola Droid and the MyTouch 3G also have a strong consumer focus, if the advertising campaigns are any indication.