ABI deserves credit for its valiant effort to bring meaning to an increasingly meaningless term. The distinction between "open" platform phones and the rest is a real one. ABI isn't making it up. (The operating systems ABI is referring to are the Symbian OS, Linux, Windows Mobile, RIM BlackBerry or the Garnet OS, formerly known as the Palm OS.)

The distinction is real, but arcane, irrelevant and confusing. It's a distinction not worth making for most of us. Nowadays, the distinction matters only to software developers.

I think analysts lean too heavily on this distinction and need to come up with a new way to talk about the mobile phone market. Ideally, they should try to agree on a feature grid that includes all the major technologies -- multimedia, GPS, Internet access, keyboard types, pointing devices, cameras and so on.

Whether devices support "open" software development or "sandbox" platforms (BREW and Java) -- or are closed altogether -- should be one pillar of categorization. But it shouldn't be the main one, and it shouldn't use the term "smartphone."

The truth is that the lay public doesn't know what "smartphone" means, the experts disagree and vendors can't use it.