How Smart Is Your Cellphone?

The Boston Globe (registration required) looks at the growing market for smart phones "driven by the broader availability of broadband wireless networks that can accommodate audio, video, and other services more popular among everyday users than mobile professionals."

According to Seamus McAteer at M:Metrics, mobile multimedia applications are one of the key things pushing cellphones closer to smart phones in terms of functionality. "We have to move away from defining devices in terms of smart and instead define them in terms of their function attributes and their appeal to certain segments: enterprise handsets, entertainment handsets, mass market phones," McAteer said.

The article cites figures from M;Metrics that "more than 48 percent of the 2.1 million cellphone subscribers with smart phones are between ages 25 and 44 while only 5.93 percent are 55 to 64."

"What will define phones that are smarter is that they're focused on markets that are very targeted," McAteer added.