After a meeting at the World Technology Conference in Milan, mobile cell phone companies are urging customers to stop using the phrase 'smart phone' to describe touch screen phones.
"These phones are pretty smart," said Nokia boss, Samuel Sung. "However, by contrast any phone that is not a smart phone, must be a dumb phone. This has caused Europe wide outages of not-smart-phones refusing to make calls, and acting dumb."
Many phone owners had put the outages down to the big phone companies trying to force everybody onto smart phones in a bid to turn the world into zombies that walk the world unseeing, heads bowed, clutching their smart phone, but it is not the case.
"The bulk of the phone market is not iPhone, Android or Blackberry," said Sung, forgetting Windows Mobile, like most people do. "It is making and receiving calls and texts. Oh and the occasional photograph. These phones have decided that they don't want to be dumb phones, and have been going on strike. We caught them communicating through SMS when pay-as-you-go customers appeared to be being charged for texts they hadn't made."
The discovery that dumb phones are smarter than smart phones has some phone manufacturers scratching their heads.
"The ability to communicate wasn't built into the phones," said Sung. "Well...it was, but not the way they're doing it. Of course they're built to communicate, they're phones."
Artificial Intelligence researchers believe the SMS network of dumb phones may be evidence of an emergent intelligence, something that they thought would come out of the internet.
"It's amazing," said Professor Brian Cox. "But I guess texting has been around an amazingly long time, which explains how my nan can do it. Amazing."
