The Diminishing Feature Phones

It was around this time last year that I thought if feature phones will stay alive with the giant monster known as smart phones on their tale. Well it seems as though I was correct: the variety of feature phones have been declining ever since then.

January of 2010 was when I first received a phone. I was in 7th grade, I think I deserved one. So I got myself a Motorola Rival, a small, QWERTY, messaging feature phone that did the job until a few problems pushed me to my next phone. At that time of purchasing the Rival, I had a wide variety of feature phones for my choosing. Ranging from LG to Samsung, there were at least 15 feature phones I could have chosen from. 

August of 2010. After 2 replacements of the Rival, I was done. I purchased a Samsung Reality, which at the time was considered to be in Verizon's 3G Multimedia category. This category allowed some Internet access and more options than a feature phone, but less options than smart phones. At this time as well, I could have stuck to another feature phone as there were the same amount of feature phones, if not more. But I still had this feeling that there was a change on the way. 

It is May of 2011. Now I have been through 2 more devices and currently own a Verizon iPhone. A recent trip to the Verizon store showed me the decline in the feature phones and no sign at all of the 3G Multimedia category of phones either. The store was basically divided into two sections: the smart phones (which took up 95% of the store), and the feature phones. The feature phones just had 2 QWERTY style phones and the rest were the cheap flip-phones. The rest of the store was filled with Blackberry's, iPhones, and Androids. 

Why?

When Android and iPhone was released to the public was when the feature phones knew their downfall was coming soon. As more and more people began to buy these type of smart phones, more competitors joined in to develop these. The more smart phones that were released, the less space there was for the feature phones. It was a continuing cycle until finally, the amount of feature phones decreased into a small corner of the store. Based on these statistics, feature phones will be completely gone by early to mid 2012. 

Twitter

Twitter Releasing "You Both Follow" Feature

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on tommaxwellblog.com. View the original here: http://www.tommaxwellblog.com/blog/2010/8/13/twitter-releasing-you-both-follow-feature.html 

Twitter recently released a new "Who to Follow" feature which recommends people to follow based on your interests and who your followers are following. Now they are releasing a feature they began testing in June called "You Both Follow" which shows you people yourself and another Twitter user mutually follow.

To see this feature, simply visit another user's profile and see who you have in common on their sidebar. You also have the option to click "View all" and see a full list of mutual followers. It seems like quite a pointless feature in my opinion but at least nobody can complain that they don't have it, right?

Exposé For iPhone?

Exposé is one of the most productive and useful feature in Mac OS X. Have you ever thought of it on an iPhone or iPod Touch? Ocean Observations has an idea, an Exposé feature for the iPhone and iPod Touch by using the home button’s double tap features. Tap the home button, and up to 9 pages of homescreen are shown in a grid. Tapping any of the displayed pages will jump you directly to that page, allowing you to skip from page 1 to page 8 without swiping 7 times. Interesting idea, but would Apple include this or would it be a “jailbroken iPhone charm”? I can see myself using this, because it could also mean running apps in the background. Here below is a demo of the “iPhone Springboard Exposé”

Google Street View: Invading our Privacy?

Google Street View is a new feature in Google's free online and offline maps service. Its quite helpful.

But do you think its invading our privacy?