THE FEATURE PHONES

By: Mary Joy Mondero

      Given the craze around the iPhone, MotorolaDroid, Palem Pre and Nexus One, it might seem that nearly everyone has a smartphone. But most consumers use simpler, much cheaper phones.

     The cellphone industry prefers to call them feature phones, to distinguished them from smartphones like the Pre on the Droid, but they could just as well be called "kinda smart phones".

     Although one is easily identified by boxy designs and miniscule, poorly pixelated screens many feature phones these days more closely resemble their smarter cousins because software improvements enable them to run more sophosticated mobile applications.

     Sleek offering from Samsung, LG and Motorola move attracted the attention of entrepreneurs and software companies hoping to market functions similar to those found on the iPhones, one phone, the LG Vu, for example, has a three-inch touch screen with "maptic feedback" so the user feels a response when topping on the screen, a 2 megapixel camera and up to 4 gigabytes of external memory- enough to fit hundreds of additional applicants.

     However, when it was released in the Philippines, there's no unlimited internet or data connection available. Instead the local carrier had subscription plans that bundled limited data connection either killed by the minute or by KB. TRhe configuration for the local iPhone 3G did not provide for the functionality to edit the Access Point Name (APN), the gateway used to allow the device to connect to the data network. A new configuration was released that allowed access to the APN is set to a valid gateway address.

Credits to:  www.phonescoop.com/glossary/ term.ph

                  congeries.unwireindia.com