Invasion of the Feature Phone!

Have you noticed the number of feature phones increasing lately? More importantly, have you noticed now capable some of these phones are? Its got me wondering about where smartphones and feature phones are going to intersect.

Feature phones include the Sidekick, Samsung Instinct and Impression, LG Xenon and Motorola Hint and they are really quite capable; there is really very little that separates these from smartphone.  What keeps feature phones from being considered "smart" would be third-party developers, customization, tethering and a few other things.  The newest Sidekick does stretch this definition though, as it already has dozens of apps in its app store.

This is exactly my point though.  If you look at using phones more or less out of the box there is very little difference between these two classes.  You can browse, email, listen to music, watch videos, etc.  Believe it or not, there are a LOT of users of iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry that are actually out-of-the-box types that do little or no customization.

One of the biggest differences we see is in the cost of data.  In Canada you can get $10 unlimited mobile browsing (which really doesn’t differentiate between browsing and downloading data) but data costs (for smartphones) are astronomical.  From Bell you can get $10 unlimited internet on a feature phone but on Windows Mobile you pay $35 for 500mb.  Pretty darn nuts!

So, what is going to happen?  Will we see high priced data packages start being used on feature phones or much better flat rates for all phones?  Obviously I would hope that carriers just bite the bullet and make mobile data flat rate and cheap.  Maybe figure out some way to detect tethering or something, but devices should be FULLY usable.

Lets hope that competition makes cheap mobile data a reality.