Comment Tweet Share Share Digg

.

While smartphones seem to be hogging all the air-time lately, it’s easy to forget that most of the world (over 80%) is still using basic or feature phones. While this may be a sobering statistic for app developers hoping to get rich quick by selling half a billion 99c iPhone apps to India, it need not affect the mobile world’s ‘appiness too much, because Israeli firm Snaptu is rather successfully bringing high end apps to low end phones in the cloud.

Snaptu, which was founded with the mass market in mind, works on what Simon Davies, the firm’s European MD, calls “any old dumb phone.” By connecting up to Snaptu’s servers, users with even basic phones can access virtual applications running in the cloud through Snaptu’s own “tiny little application.”

According to Davies, Snaptu allows users with very low end phones to “manipulate” very high end smartphone apps, making them feel native to the phone, despite the fact they are running remotely.

The firm works with various content partners like Facebook or channels like ESPN and weather stations to provide smartphone-like app ability on any phone. The apps are slick and snappy too, since Snaptu users’ phones take on the processing power of the servers rather than the processing power of their own limited hardware.

It’s an ingenious idea and one that is already seeing significant take-up and interest. You can watch a quick demo of Snaptu and listen to Simon talk more about Snaptu in the video below.