Tech Talk: David Behrens looks at the revolution in phone use.

ONLY two years ago, everyone wanted an MP3 player, and electronics factories across the Far East were churning them out by the thousand. Not only Apple iPods but also Sony Walkmans and a slew of lesser-known brands were competing for shelf space at Currys.
By The Newsroom
Published 26th Sep 2011, 01:00 BST

Now, suddenly, they’re out of favour. We’ve discovered that smartphones can do everything the iPod did and a lot more besides. Smartphones are several devices rolled into one: they can make and receive phone calls and texts, naturally, but they can also access your email and the internet and play back your audio and video files, even downloading new ones on demand.

Just like MP3 players, smartphones fall into broadly two categories: those made by Apple and those from everyone else. Apple’s product is the iPhone, which runs a proprietary operating system and gets added functionality from independently-developed specialist applications (“apps”) which you download from Apple’s “app store”. Apple chooses which apps it will carry, and takes a cut of download charges.

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Most of the non-Apple smartphones are built around Android, an operating system developed by Google. It runs on the same principles, but Google is less prescriptive on what it will allow into its apps “market”.

The proliferation of these units also has its downside, and for many users that has taken the form of unexpectedly high monthly bills. Download limits for non-Apple smartphones can be strict, and there are steep penalties – sometimes as much as £100 per gigabyte – for going over your usage limit.

Not surprisingly , this has put off some users, and exposed a gap in the market for a smartphone that doesn’t actually make calls and thus needs no contract. Apple’s iPod Touch is such a device, and Samsung, Sony and Philips are said to be on the brink of launching rivals. All connect to the internet but via wi-fi hotspots only. The makers are relying on our willingness to carry around two devices: a cheap phone to make calls and send texts, and a wi-fi “phone that’s not a phone” for everything else.

That’s no help to existing Android users running up bigger bills than expected. To them, the advice is to turn off unnecessary apps, some of which eat up data by connecting to the internet even when they’re not in use, and to switch to wi-fi whenever there’s a signal.

Related topics:AppleGoogleCurrys