Quote:
Originally Posted by
RobertR 
I'm not sure where the 95% comes from. As I see it, there are three categories of people regarding smartphones:
A. Those who want the features and are willing to pay both a high initial outlay and a high monthly cost.
B. Those who want the features, but are much more price sensitive than category A, ie won't pay a high monthly cost or a high initial outlay.
C. Those who aren't technologically savvy, or technophobes (my mother would fit in this category), and just want to talk.
Does category C really make up 95% of the population? I doubt it. Think of all the business users with (often subsidized) Blackberries, plus all the people using music players, digital cameras, tablets, wifi enabled laptops, etc. Using a smartphone would seem perfectly natural to them. It's always been the trend that more technology is incorporated into devices at lower cost over time, which means that more and more people in category B are going to buy and use smartphones. If a phone has a (gasp!) camera or music player or texting capabilities, etc. and is still CHEAP, why would anyone consider it a "problem" or " disadvantage" that it has such features? And if he happens to use such a capability and decides "hey, I like this", that's nice too.
Don't know about the rather high "95%" (clearly very rough and perhaps exaggerated) guesstimate, but I would debate whether the average smartphone (at least up til very recently) would be "perfectly natural" to those folks who use the various more traditional CE devices. Many such folks aren't very savvy about how they use such devices afterall much like how so many people never figured out how to use their cameras in anything other than Auto mode or how to program their VCRs before they moved along to DVD, etc. And how many folks really know how to maintain -- let alone customize (w/out breaking stuff) -- their PCs/laptops? Many of those folks are probably better off w/ something less powerful and/or less flexible so they don't go shooting themselves in the foot left and right w/ all the unnecessary stuff -- and some are just better off paying someone else to do much of the computing stuff for them (at least until technology advances into the Star Trek age perhaps).
Besides, although it seems nice and cool to have all those features packed into one slim portable much like a good swiss-army knife, not everyone's big on swiss-army knives either. And that's besides whether even the best smartphone (for any particular person) can really be quite as good as the best swiss-army knife one can own. Let's face it. None of these smartphones will replace a tablet or a laptop or fullsize PC (to any great degree) at this stage in tech advancement. None of them are as good as a separate camera for photos (and likely videos as well) although I suppose the average, auto-mode-only folk might not care. And the list can go on to varying degrees. So most folks will still end up finding a need to have more than just a smartphone to cover all those features anyway. IMHO, the few things that a smartphone is really good at are quick on-the-go gaming and info lookup, music playback and email/texting/videophone/social networking type stuff -- and the latter is part of where having the built-in camera would be most useful besides any impromptu quick snapshots/video rather than having that completely replace a separate camera (at least for those of us who actually knows how to use a camera or cares about the quality).
"Need" is a loaded word of course. But the point is smartphones aren't exactly free. They still come w/ fairly substantial costs, so most folks will need to justify those costs until such become essentially negligible. And that's besides the debate about whether Android-based offerings are generally recommendable to the average not-so-tech-savvy folk -- they can always pick iPhone, if they can justify the costs.
Personally, I think the KISS principle applies here, and probably much of the smartphone world still does not come close enough to satisfying that principle (and its implications) to make most -- maybe even the iPhone -- all that recommendable to the average folk. Then again, if/when the average folk progresses to become part of the social networking crowd, yeah, I can see the smartphone becoming more of a "need" to justify the additional costs (over a not-so-smart-phone).
FWIW, my wife started using Facebook (on top of her usual email usage) some months ago, but she's still not feeling the vibe to justify the added costs of a smartphone -- she's amused though that I still don't have a Facebook account, but now have the Facebook app installed on my BB (w/ her account). Like some of the others mentioned here, she really just wants a basic phone for the most part although she certainly wouldn't reject a virtually free iPhone either, if that's actually being offered. Meanwhile, my mother rejected our offer to get her an iPad for a nice present. She doesn't even want me to pay several extra dollars a month to upgrade her dial-up(!) internet access (that she uses very sparingly for the rare email and, ahem, virtually nonexistent web access) to Verizon's basic aDSL, LOL -- I try to convince her every few months about that, especially now that she's out of work and at home all the time, but she just doesn't see the point. We even tried to sneak in some added incentive for her to migrate to broadband service when we bought her a new digital TV (instead of the iPad) w/ Netflix, Facebook, etc. apps built-in, but nada so far. In her case, a smartphone just wouldn't do anyway because she just can't see well enough anymore to make much use of the essentially tiny display (even though she's not quite that old yet) -- and there are probably plenty of (babyboomer-and-older) folks like her in that regard who are not just being totally technophobic or the like...
_Man_
