Japanese cellphones had a lot of the same use-cases that modern smartphones have. You could buy stuff online, use GPS, surf the mobile web, send pictures via email and purchase stuff and movies (disney even produced direct to featurephone cartoons in Japan!).<p>This is usually used as an argument for why the Japanese decided to colloquially shorten 携帯電話 (&quot;keitai denwa&quot;, hand-held telephone) into just 携帯(hand-held, or handy) instead of just calling it 電話(phone) like so many western countries do or 携電(&quot;kei-den&quot;), which follows a more typical pattern for abbreviations in Japanese.<p>However, with the success of the iPhone, which was incompatible with all the featurephone services a new segment arose consisting of iPhones and non-backward compatible Android handsets, and these are denoted as &quot;smartphones&quot; shorten to スマホ(sma-pho).<p>I think it is interesting that they chose to move closer towards the &quot;phone&quot; moniker, than staying with the focus on hand-held.