Given the craze surrounding the iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre and Nexus One, it may seem that nearly everyone has a smartphone.
But most consumers in the United States use simpler, much lower-cost phones.
According to data from the Nielsen Co., about 82 percent of cell phones in use in the United States are limited-function phones, the kind that typically sell for less than $50 or are given away with two-year service contracts.
The cell phone industry prefers to call them feature phones, to distinguish them from smartphones like the Pre or the Droid, but they could just as well be called “kinda smartphones.”
Although once easily identified by boxy designs and minuscule, poorly pixelated screens, many feature phones these days more closely resemble their smarter cousins because software improvements enable them to run more sophisticated mobile applications.
“Feature phones are migrating away from the tiny screens that characterized their dominance in the era of the Motorola Razr,” said Ross Rubin, an industry analyst with the NPD Group, a market research company. “They have more sophisticated operating systems, touch screens and bigger screens.”
Sleek offerings from Samsung, LG and Motorola have attracted the attention of entrepreneurs and software companies hoping to market functions similar to those found on the iPhone. One phone, the LG Vu, for example, has a three-inch, or 7.6-centimeter, touch screen with “haptic feedback” so the user feels a response when tapping on the screen; a two-megapixel camera; and as many as four gigabytes of external memory — enough to fit hundreds of additional applications.
Another, the Motorola Clutch, has a Web browser and support for GPS functions and is Bluetooth-enabled. These phones typically come loaded with a simple suite of applications selected by the carrier, like puzzle games, a mobile e-mail application, a navigation application and an instant-messaging client. “These companies are trying…