Feature phone - where there are few features

Feature phone is a silly name.

Smartphones now dominate mobile phone sales — even in poor countries. Yet not everyone wants a touch screen device with the power of a laptop in their pocket.

And not everyone can afford to pay for a fancy touch screen device.

The obvious name for a phone that doesn’t qualify as a smartphone is ‘dumb phone’ or possibly ‘ordinary phone’.

This creates a problem for the insecure marketing people working for phone makers. They can’t bring themselves to use such honest, straightforward terms to describe their products.

Hence we have feature phones. A remarkable term given the main thing about a feature phone is that it has few, if any, features worth talking about.

Although that doesn’t mean they have to be boring.

While we’re on this subject, it’s time to drop the smart from smartphones. The prefix made sense 10 years ago when most phones weren’t smart, but now it is the status quo. Let’s call them phones and have done with it.