Transition from Feature phones to smart phones driven by the Internet

The mobile industry is under a revolution from the all classy N series to the affordable, power packed android smartphones and not to forget the iPhones. Travelling back in time, 4 years ago a smartphone was not an affordable commodity for the common man. Feature phones were all around, people were happy using them. The fact that those days the feature phones solved the basic needs of communication was all what we needed. There were few who would buy smartphones and very few of those would access internet over the phone. As I said, communication was the need of the hour. There was no Android then, Internet was still trying to reach to capture the mobile devices as well.

I used an N series device for quite sometime, with lack of good Applications for the platform, all I could do was download few games from the desktop and then install them on my device. What a pain it used to be. No question of checking your emails through them. And with those games getting monotonous over time would leave you bored to death.  There was nothing interesting I could do on my phone apart from SMS and phone calls.

Then came Android and pat it changed the complete mobile industry, feature phones started to become obsolete , smartphones were the talk of the hour. Companies like Samsung, HTC, Motorola just took this OS and started building numerous smartphones covering all the alphabets of english language. And players like Micromax and others started to release low end Android powered smartphones. And now the market is flooded with Smartphones be it powered by Android or the executive Blackberries or the all elite iPhones. These devices provide all the feature phones provided but in a better way and add on more stuff to it so as to keep the user excited about using them.

The smartphone revolution was aptly backed by the penetration of Internet into these devices with operators in India providing 3G services, which provide much higher bandwidth then their predecessors. Each platform- Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows provide their app store from where users can browse and download from a plethora of applications. And it also provided an opportunity for people to spawn off companies around developing applications for these platforms.

I did succumb to buying an Android powered Samsung smartphone, but for quite sometime I didn’t activate any of the GPRS or 3G services, instead preferred to connect via WiFi at home. But this didn’t make sense for the fact that the time when I most need my phone to depict its smart capabilities, it couldn’t. So with a GPRS service activated I more or less keep my emails, twitter feeds in sync. This helps me to be connected all the time. My friends ping me on Gtalk and no matter where I am, I can respond to them using my device. The fact that I can use my device to kill time during a boring class is awesome.

Off late I downloaded few games from the Android Marketplace and the idea of playing online with another gamer is just awesome. It removes the boredom from the game. I did manage to spend the whole day playing Defender 2. And there are lot more engaging games to choose from. So you are never short of trying something new. Everytime I visit the Marketplace I have something new to try, something exciting to learn about.

The Internet on my mobile device keeps me:

• Connected with my friends via GTalk
• Keeps me updated about whats happening around via the Twitter application
• Allows me to check and respond to my emails using my EMail client or GMail application.
• Helps me to fight the boredom by playing games live with other players.. The favorites being- Defender 2 and Drag Race.
• Helps me to follow cricket scores even in the middle of a class using the ESPNCricinfo Application.
• Helps me sync my todo’s, notes using Evernote application.

How has the smartphone and the internet changed your life?

And these thoughts were penned down as part of the Indiblogger contest on “Internet if fun” sponsored by Vodafone (www.vodafone.in/fun).