eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Online Marketing

Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org

16.3 Mobile Phones: More than Phone Calls

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

1. Learn about the three categories of mobile phones and how they fit into the eMarketing landscape.

There are three categories of mobile phones.

Basic phones can make voice calls, send and receive SMS (short message service) messages and make

use of USSD (unstructured supplementary services data).

Feature phones offer features additional to a basic phone, including cameras and increased storage,

as well as the ability to access the Internet. Feature phones usually have a standard numeric keypad.

Note

QWERTY refers to a full keypad like the keyboard of a computer.

Smartphones offer advanced capabilities and features over feature phones, notably allowing users to

add applications to their phones. These phones run a full-featured operating system; most

have 3G (third-generation) as well as Wi-Fi (wireless-fidelity) capabilities and generally have a

QWERTY keypad.

Note that there is not yet an industry-standard definition of a smartphone, and many feature phones

are now being developed with technology similar to smartphones. Smartphones tend to have bigger

screens than feature phones.