MOBILE BEAT produced a chart (above) to draw distinctions between superphones like the Xperia X10 and the smartphone like my Nokia E90. Superphones have more powerful processors and they are much more extensible than any previous mobile platform. But because of their power and because they're always connected to a network, they draw more power, need bigger batteries and have to be recharged more frequently.
A lot of my friends have jumped directly into superphones from feature phones, mainly because of relatively inexpensive ways to jump onto contracts for iPhones and Android devices.The active installed base of Superphones (currently 100 million devices) should double by the end of 2011. The problem I face is most of my creative multimedia students don't even have smartphones. Getting superphones into half of the purses and pockets on campus is probably two years away--and then that's problematic because a lot of people expect tuition fees to be imposed by that time.
Superphone apps have changed the way people look at the internet. I reckon people would rather get "an app for that" instead of searching for an internet URL. This consumer behaviour will change the way people view the internet in the decade ahead.
Rob Glaser -- "The Superphone era is unstoppable" on the Mobile Beat blog, July 7, 2010.
