Most of the time "flashing" a phone (presumably referring to androids) involves using the recovery, which is basically a stripped down version of android. In that sense it's not any lower level than booting off a USB drive to fix your computer.
According to your standard: to "flash" something, at least you need to use the bootloader itself, or possibly at a lower level? Well, calling the process of uploading a firmware image to an embedded device during early boot via U-Boot as "firmware flashing" is well established, so we can start from here... thus, uploading a new Android image in Android Recovery is not "flashing", but uploading a "recovery" image in Android bootloader is? Now, would you call firmware uploading via iOS's DFU mode "flashing" too? Or do you believe that the DFU mode is end-user accessible, thus not low-level enough? Then, would you accept that uploading the firmware to the baseband processor (which I believe uses its own EEPROM) via DFU "flashing"?
I guess the definition varies, it was what I meant by "an appropriate context".
>thus, uploading a new Android image in Android Recovery is not "flashing", but uploading a "recovery" image in Android bootloader is? Now, would you call firmware uploading via iOS's DFU mode "flashing" too? Or do you believe that the DFU mode is end-user accessible, thus not low-level enough? Then, would you accept that uploading the firmware to the baseband processor (which I believe uses its own EEPROM) via DFU "flashing"?
The difference is that the recovery is almost a full blown operating system. It can mount filesystems, has various shell utilities installed, and there's a user interface (through ADB and on-screen). This in contrast to fastboot which has noneof those things, and only allows you to flash/erase partitions with the help of a computer.
