- Dumbphone - That boring flip phone your mom has that (maybe) takes pictures, sends texts, plays Pac Man, and little else. They're usually free. If you search hard enough, you can find a website on the internet that will pay YOU money to take one of these off their hands. (I'm not joking). These phones would have been pretty sweet in 2002. Now? Not so much.
- Smartphone - BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Palm. In other words, the phones you see commercials for, the phones that make carriers the most money and the phones that MOST adults have these days. They can do most things your computer can do, like run applications, access the internet (in USABLE ways), fetch email, etc.
- Feature Phone - The hellish grey area between smartphones and dumbphones. Since there will always be people who are intimidated by BlackBerry's and iPhone because they're "too complicated" (...), carriers and manufactures sell featurephones. These phones give people the illusion of having something more than a dumbphone. While it's partially true (they tend to come preloaded with "apps"), they're really just glorified dumb phones.
Why are they glorified dumbphones? Simple. The run proprietary, often carrier specific software, meaning you have zero control over how your phone operates. Your buddy with the Droid download a cool new app you wanna try out? Tough tiddies, you ain't puttin' that shit on your feature phone. is the SMS app on your featurephone getting you down? Oh well, you're stuck with it due to the inability to customize this phone in ANY way, shape or form. These phones are especially bad because since they're data intensive (they focus attention on these psuedo apps they know people want), you're gonna wind up paying the same montly bill as the guy that has the Droid or the iPhone. So you may have saved $30 bucks in upfront price when buying the phone, but the carrier is still getting their money out of you, all the while you're stuck with a vastly inferior device. It's one of the biggest forms of highway robbery in the tech industry. Worse than this stupid 3D TV thing. But I'll save that for another day.
