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andyring writes "CNN has an interesting article about the increasing trend in electronics to add more and more features, less concise user manuals, and poor marketing, to products, which end up doing nothing more than increasing costs and frustrating users. As an example in the article, most people want cell phones that do one thing - make calls. Yet phones come with games, instant messaging, cameras, etc. You can't even buy a simple cell phone any more. Also cited, 25% of people think they own an HDTV, when the actual number is less than 10%. What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?"
quality control.
Learn to live by them.
Sent from your iPad.
Cell phones have become so fragmented, as most carriers offer multiple handsets with a variety of features which appeal to differing tastes. However, I still refuse to buy a new phone because my carrier still hasn't offered a phone that meets my specific needs. All I want is a good, small, clamshell, tri-mode phone from Verizon with built-in Bluetooth. I could care less about a camera, I already invested in a digital camera with a better resolution, and there seems to be a lot of anti-camera phone sentiment. When I went to get my passport renewed, people had to surrender their batteries.
In terms of user manuals. It's not like a lot of people read them anyway...that's like asking people to read the articles prior to reply here on slashdot. Look at all the good detailed instructions did for getting baby-boomers to program their VCR or time display.
How many software packages actually come with a full set of documentation anymore these days - it's like we are expected to go out any buy the user manual.
HDTV is a tough subject, because the industry has done such a poor job on rolling out HDTV. Not just the manufacturers, but also the stations, cable companies and the damned FCC. But you would think you would know whether or not you have HDTV after seeing what 1080i looks like.
The competing formats of DVD is equally confusing. My father-in-law made the mistake of buying DVD+R discs only to find out that he needed -R for his drive.
Personally, I like all the extra doohickeys on my cellphone. I mean, I like space invaders, and it's on my phone.
props to GNAA
What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?
Like most businesses, they listen to only one thing: their bottom line. If you don't need a camera on your phone (and, frankly, who does?) then don't spend the extra few bucks on it. Make sure you tell the person why. There will certainly be some trickle effect of what is said, whether to management, at trade shows or in the media.
Unfortunately you have the KeepingUpWithTheJoneses factor to deal with: Jones(A) gets a new phone with games. Not to be outdone, Jones(B) gets a phone with games and a camera. Jones(C) gets a phone with games and a higher-resolution camera.. Repeat ad infinitum.
This isn't intended soley as potshots against camera phones but against the "Faster, Smaller, Better" upgrade cycle that these manufacturers impose on the consumers. Remember that every dollar you spend is after-tax money. Now think about how much that shiny new widget will really cost before you walk to the cash register. You need the money more than they do.
Trolling is a art,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
10,000 songs,
audiophile quality,
least restrictive DRM,
6 buttons,
iPod.
Of course, on the other hand:
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Nextels, I305, I205, I88.
simple (expensive) phones that one thing and do it well
Make calls.
it is time to seriously start with it
SHE does throw dice.
I think I have a reliable OS, but in truth I run Windows.
"What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?" Easy. Make them give us all their stuff for free.
How about those awful mice with the high but little used "scroll wheel" that keeps getting in the way when I have my index finger cross the mouse to hit the first mouse button? I've taken to gouging these off. This is just an example of downgrading things with new "Features" that get in the way.
(Damn, I've been waiting forever for a flimsy excuse to link to that page.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
User interfaces should be well-designed and as simple to use as possible. Granted.
Include a quickstart guide with your gear. Good idea.
But for God's sake, don't forget about the concise user manual. I hate buying new gear and not getting a good manual with it. The manual should explain everything the unit can do in every configuration.
If they want to make a simple quickstart guide too, that's great, but don't leave out the full-blown details.
What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?
Um, ok. So, let me get this straight. You want these manufacturers to _not_ take advantage of the people dumb enough to believe they are buying something else. Those 15% of the people that think that they have an HDTV, probably bought something that was overpriced, and might end up buying equipment that would only work to it's fullest with a HDTV system. They're making money off of the stupid. I don't expect them to change. While it would be moral and nice of them to, but since when is capitalism moral and nice? It's about money, and if someone wants to give it to them, they will take it.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
I hope this get's modded up.
I can see that the author doesn't use emacs.
I don't own a cell phone. People tell me it's because I don't have any friends. Oh well.
And while they add these features to cell phones, thay make them hard to use. I've got a recent Nokia phone where the buttons are in diagonal columns, instead of the standard straight-up-and-down, straight-across 4 x 3 array that has been around decades.
It is not just Nokia. There are portable phones that actually have the buttons in curving rows. Why make it harder to do the "dialing numbers" part of using a phone?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Anyone know if the reason 15% of people falsely think they have an HDTV television is because they only have EDTV? Seems like a fair reason, since no one has heard of EDTV.
What all these gadgets really need is something like the Mac OS "Simple Finder", which hides all the extra goodies if you don't need them.
"Also cited, 25% of people think they own an HDTV, when the actual number is less than 10%"
Surely this is consumer ignorance, not manufacturers putting extra "doohicky's" in there ?
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Linux was the only thing getting bloated
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?
Have they visited their proctologists lately?
Sounds like business as usual to me.
I guess I'll never cease to be amazed at the medias propensity to discover the obvious.
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
kill everyone in marketing.
Most people just want a cell phone that makes reliable calls. Cell phone manufacturers, however, want people to continue buying new cell phones so they add features to entice a customer into buying another model.
This conflict will always be here.
You can indeed buy a simple cell phone.
Why in my desk drawer alone, I have 3 that I will be more than happy to sell to you.
I think I have an HDTV, therefore I am.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Let's face it; when it comes to technology, most people are ignorant. No matter how simple we make things, there will always be simpler people.
FloodMT: crapflood Movab
Is why they keep making them smaller?
I kind of like my ancient cell phone. It's not nearly as small as the ones out now, and yet it still isn't big enough to reach between my mouth and my ear.
AT&T makes phones that use multiple channels to connect to the internet but regular voice call quality is a single channel and still sounds like garbage.
Maybe if they fix the sound quality people will like it better.
I find it interesting to look at the number of high-end replacement devices exist for home theaters. That's a market that's added every feature known to man, and the most loved component is often the Universal Remote that can simplify it to the point of actual usability by Mom. All of the power is still there, but there's a simple, unified interface for MOST users. Apple has done the same thing for years, and does it best in OSX. All the power is there, but the usability is so great that most people never notice. Tivo is an amazingly complex system behind the scenes (by normal person standards,) but the usability is such that again, Mom can use it. You don't have to have a simple product, you just have to make it usable for simple people.
Think back to the pre-digital days of cellphones. The cellphone had status. The smaller the phone, the more status. Remember when the Motorola Startac sold for over $1000? It was so incredibly small! And then of course more and more stuff got integrated onto chips, and lithium batteries came out, and then they had the ability to make phones really really small. These same developments also made them cheaper. The result was that the cellphone lost its status (remember Zoolander's mobile?). So, what is it now? Two things: a practical voice communication tool, of course. And... entertainment, and a new status thing in the form of having more cool features. Have you noticed that cellphones now are getting bigger? There will always be the older generation who want the phone to be as simple and convenient as possible and have no added features, but those are not high-markup sales. In fact those phones are sold in very small margins. The real money is being made on phones with cameras, two color screens, MP3 players, PDA features, push-to-talk, video players, and Java games, all in a three-ounce package that you can take with you. And yes, you can still buy basic phones. You can't buy a phone without a phone book, messaging and a minibrowser anymore, but those features are unobtrusive and users who don't care can just ignore them. For the rest of us, phones are cool.
Its not just about getting manufacturers back to reality. Its also about myriad (and confusing) standards/jargon/terms whatever. Too many standards. Too many buzzwords. Too much chaos.
I know its wrong but its asking too much if you expect your average consumer to RTFM. Also, if he/she does RTFM, its too much asking for them to be able to figure everything out. How many of us were not confused atleast once while assembling a simple bookshelf and looking at the instructions?
Which reminds me of the "How many people can even program their VCR?"
Free XBox, PS2
The iPod has obnoxious DRM. This is once you get around the hassle of the non-standard AAC files.
The buttons overlook the obvious: NO ON/OFF SWITCH! The lack of this basic control is a glaring, but unfortunately common, design flaw. Yet again, Apple is the company that replaced the "disk eject button" with a "tiny pinhole that takes bent paperclip to eject disk".
Too bad people are sheep ...said the sheep? Cause certainly it wasn't the wolf.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Notice to the design team:
Do not add unnecessary features, or we will send Gene Simmons to live in your cubicles for a year.
-The Management
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
I like camera phones and phones with web access. But when I go to work, those phones have to stay in my glove box. Not because of the distraction, but because of the nature of the features themselves. Consider this: how many firms would allow a worker to walk around with a cellular, web connected camera? Any camera phone does that. And a PDA phone with blue tooth or IR? You are dreaming. Its the information...its all about the information!
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
I have a HDTV cell phone. Really. I do. The salesman told me so.
I prefer better battery capacity over all this features... Just look at Nokia... They add more and more features, but battery lifetime get less for every new phone they release :(
Feature creep does not just make things more complicated, it makes things more failure prone. For example, the Canon i450 is a very simple printer that you can buy for $80 and that works very well. It has now been replaced by the i470, which is EXACTLY the same print engine and chassis, but which adds an LCD display and a control panel and raises the price to $130. These extra "features" thus raise the price of the printer by over 60% but they do nothing more than replicate in hardware EXACTLY the same things that can be done with the printer driver software (i.e., change the printer settings). So no true functionality is added, but now a simple reliable printer has a bunch of additional electro-mechanical MOVING PARTS that can fail. I use lots of i450s as portable knock-around printers for my field team, and when I saw the i470, I immediately bought more i450s before they disappeared. I want simple things that don't break, and I don't want to pay for useless add-ons.
You can most certainly get a basic phone here in Mexico, since we have a larger need for cheap models like low-end Nokias (3300 series and 1100 are popular) and the Sony Ericsson T106, which are basic no-frills phones, good for making calls and sending SMS (which is really useful) and nothing more. B&W screens and monophonic ringtones are the norm at this level. Just cuz they don't sell in the US doesn't mean they don't exist. And while cameras I think are superfluous, color screens and poly ringtones are really nice to have, and connectivity options like bluetooth and infrared enable one to use the phone as a communications tool (which it is!) for your digital devices.
That's what I thought. But from what I hear, only way you can get just a "plain" cell phone (give or take a few extra features) is to buy a really cheap one. But, if you buy a really cheap one, you get all sorts of problems like bad reception. Now on the other hand, if you buy an uber expensive phone with the camera and the entire package, you also get better reception and all sorts of expensive goodies. It seems hard to just get EXACTLY what you want. Bunch of shit comes with what you want. And without the shit, all you get is shit. Ah, quite a dilemma.
Stinky.
- shazow
The usability guru Donald Norman, of Nielsen Norman Group fame, writes in his book "The Usability of Everyday Things" that when plotted against time, the usability of any given product is a bell curve. First-generation devices are highly usable; yet, as the competition evolves, manufactures add gimmicks and sacrifice usability. At some point there is a return to simplicity that represents market recognization of the consumers' original need.
What Norman, and CNN, don't realize is that these gimmicks, difficult as they make devices, exist only to meet market demand. People use the games on their cell phones; if they didn't, the business wouldn't be profitable and the manufacturers wouldn't cater. Articles like the one from CNN are about those who live outside the standard deviation; those who are lost by the gimmicks and await the manufacturer's return to simplicity.
Those who make electronics "user transparent" will reap great benefits. Those who try to trick the consumer, or simply make clunky products, will fall by the wayside. There are examples everywhere.
Look at the portable mp3 player market: Where before there was competition between a lot of cludgy products, the ipod has set a new standard for ease of operation and "don't be afraid to break it" factor (battery issues notwithstanding.)
The Ipod shows the user only what he or she needs to know to get the ipod to play music.
For an example that is not in the high-tech arena, people pay a premium for Saturn automobiles, simply to avoid being dicked around by a car salesman.
And we keep buying stuff because the last batch didn't make us happy; we figure if Johnny bought it, and he seems happy about it, that it will make us happy, too. Every advertising dollar spent is attempting to create needs, not serve them.
Thinking outside my Head
One of the main problems with electonics is that they are welling to spend money on features, but not on the buttons to properly operate them. This is because on a per unit bases, buttons cost a lot more then a bit of extra software.
The result is unlabeled buttons that do many different things, depending on the context. Watches are one of the worst for this.
I remember at University that had this old Kodak copier where each setting had its own large, easy to press button that lit up when the setting was on. For example, light, medium and dark each had its own button and the button for the current setting was lit up.
In this quote from the article:
"Complexity is intrinsic in technology but simplicity is how we should bring it to the consumer."
Now I agree with this completely, but there's a message in here that I have some reservations about.
I believe in keeping things simple, but hiding complexity is often a double edge sword. Look at the old Mac OS 9 (and prior). The vast majority of complexity was hidden from the user... but to some of us... that meant we were forced to do things the way Apple wanted it done. Now, for many folks, that wasn't a bad thing... and were quite happy with that way. But for me, it was frustrating (which is why I found Linux).
Now, with gadgets, yes, simplicity clearly is the goal -- but making things more simple at the expense of hiding complexity -- thus handicapping (some of) the users is the balancing act that (I hope) needs to be considered.
sad robot making broken music
I agree, that user documentetion is usually poor, and eg with TV-s most people just get confused by 480p or 480i and so ...
.... and I could continue....
.......
....
... sometimes yes, I am looking for a ipaq3600 kind with HUGE mem and SD slot, but B&W display .... companies cannot make everything as modular as a PC or you will become your own washmachine and gridge systemadmin hacking your "custom crap" all day ...
I think manuals are stupid, because people do not care what they buy....
If someone does not see the different a regular 480i and anything above it, does not need the manual to explain it anyway.
What bothers me really, is the lack of information on whereever you walk in to buy something.. people in the TV store do not know what a 100hz TV is, people selling satellite equip cannot show, and cannot tell if the provided receiver has digital out (opt/coax)
I think there is a fair option to buy anything simple, you do not use the extras and keep it simple if you want
Maybe I am sick but I am always lacking options..... you can buy hanheld with XXX option OR YYY option, but not with XXX and YYY option
On the other hand
Most people never realized the usefulness of a cellphone until they got one. Now they will complain about having to buy a phone with a camera, until they find out that it can be useful to have a camera with you at all times. Check out this(mobileasses.com) if you don't believe me.
G
"Immolation is the sincerest form of flattery."
Consider the following situations...
Buying coffee in a coffee shop. All I want is plain coffee with milk and sugar. No latte , no expresso, No mocca , no nothing . just plain coffee with milk and sugar damn it. Unfortunately the 5+@rbuck5 salesgirl never understands this.
Or odered something over the phone. Say like a digital camera. you buy a camera worth 200$ and the guy wants you to sell accessories worth 500$.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Sometimes they don't have a choice. At least when it comes to features they don't want. Recently I went to get a new cell phone, and I found out that all Best Buy and my service provider offer are phones piled high with "features." My only requirement was that it gets decent reception, and it's a flip phone (so I don't scratch the screen to hell when I put it in my pocket with my keys), and the only phones that met this description are $250 phones with color and cameras. I don't really care about these features, (I already have a digital camera), to me, it's just more stuff to break.
Ahh man I've been messing with this all day.
Last year I went and bought the most expensive bleeding edge GSM cell phone I could find and now its falling apart. I'm looking to buy a replacement but I don't want a digital camera that just happens to also be a phone!
I want a work-horse that will let me make phone calls, quit dialing in my pocket (Sony Ericcson's KeyLock reminds me of those computers in Radio Shack running Win95 with a password protected screen saver that was bypassed with a simple reboot), have buttons that make sense together (what crack is Nokia smoking these days?), and last after I pay $150-$250 for it (oh yeah, I don't get the lovely rebates now that I'm already tied into a service agreement that I would like to get out of instead of extending another 2 years for AT&T to keep bending me over).
Ok, venting done. Don't even get me started on the rest of the Electronics market.
I was on the front porch the other day and one of my neighbors went next door to my other neighbor and said, "Hi, I just got a new computer screen, would like like my old one? It works fine and all you need to get is the hard drive and you'll have a whole computer!"
:-)
Um, yep.. Pure genius at work.
EVERYONE calls the computer one of the following,
1. hard drive
2. hard disk
3. hard thing
4. tower drive
5. main tower
6. pee-cee thingy
#6 is my favorite, it's always a cute woman that calls them that. I can live with that...
But really, most people are clueless.
I speak from experiance. I've been a tech for 25 years and own my own ROLM system and a DG Clariion system. I've dealt with countless thousands of people over the years and most of them are dangerous behind the keyboard, much less with a screwdriver..
What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?
Fire the marketing department.
No, really. Some marketing genius does a study, asks some set of people "Hey, we can do this really neat thing, do you want it?". Each marketing genius in the department does this. Now the department goes to the C level and says "All our studies say that people want x, y, z, and also w".
Then the engineering dept gets the WORD FROM ABOVE, and creates the product. Instant plethora of features. The product gets built, goes to stores, and the MAJORITY of people say "whoa, too complicated".
Why do you think that Windows has a dumbed down menu set?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Then, a few manufacturers started to build laptops which, while still heavy and clunky, could last long enough on battery power to do some good word processing. It was still very much a niche product, but now people like business travellers could justify using them on long trips. They became more comact, more robust. People stopped saying, "whoa, what is that thing?" and started saying, "oh, neat--a laptop computer!"
Today, laptops are amazing little machines that can have virtually every convenience of a desktop system crammed into a five pound, notebook-sized package. They're powerful enough to do virtually anything that Joe Sixpack wants to do, they're reliable, and they've gone from "bizzare gizmo" cool to "everyday useful" cool. Entire industries are springing up based around supporting mobile computing. You see a person working on a laptop at a coffee shop and hardly bat an eyelid.
Now, if you look at multi-purpose handheld gadgets today, what do you see? I see massive, clunky, overpriced, underperforming, fragile beasts that are marginally useable, at best...
Patience.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I think we should make refridgerators very difficult to use. If you're too stupid to figure them out, you don't eat. We can prune the gene pools a bit. Don't want to LEARN, fine. Don't eat. People would smarten up real quick.
Wouldn't you like to be a pepper, too?
I do actually want SMS capability in phones that I buy as that is what I primarily use my phone for. The next phone I buy will also need WAP, but they all come with that these days anyway.
Things like SMS were just 'add-ons' to bulk up a package, but they've effectivelly created their own industry and language!
Maybe there should be 'simple phones' for those who want them, but then they wouldn't be able to receive text messages, and those who send them wouldn't understand cos "everyone's phone can receive texts".
First they buy a new television that is HD-ready. Then they find out that they need a set-top box as their tv doesn't have a built-in HD tuner. So then they go out and buy the set-top box, only to find out that they need to buy a new antenea for the room. Then after they install a yagi, they find out that they live too far from the tower and the signal drops off. So then they call the cable company and find out that there are HD station on their digital cable service, but it isn't available in their area yet, and will hopefully be available by the end of the year. Then they decide to order satellite, whereby they need to go out any buy a different set-top box and then spend $$$ a month for the HBO and Showtime so they can enjoy a couple of HD channels.
Poor saps.
So, as much as it sucks, I can at least understand why companies do this.
Not only are these "gadgets" annoying and confusing, especially when you have to navigate 12 button presses of a phone just to get to the point where you can CALL someone, but the devices themselves, are getting people fired.
My girlfriend works at $BIG_PHARMACEUTICAL in CT, and they just sent out a memo last week that anyone, employee, contractor, visitor or otherwise, found carrying, using, or visibly displaying a PDA or cellphone with a camera attached or integrated, will be immediately terminated, no questions asked.
If you bring a visitor into work with you, or are eating lunch with a vendor who happens to have one of these, you will be immediately terminated.
Maybe these companies will get the message, that having a camera in a cellphone, while "cool for teens", does not make the phone more marketable to those people who actually pay their own cellphone bills (as opposed to the teens and pre-teens with phones, whose parents pay the bills for them).
Cameras on phones are a liability and a security risk, in many situations. The unemployment rate is high enough, let's not let these cellphone and handheld companies "bully" us into believing that we "need" these features. We don't.
The problem is that many of these gadgets are still in the process of being defined. Any manufacturer who decides to relax because their product doesn't need more features will go under.
I'm old enough to feel satisfied with a mobile phone that can be used only to place and receive calls, but my kids certainly aren't.
There's darwinism for you.
Snebjorn
Faster-Harder-Louder
On the other hand, there is one category of users that manufacturers are often neglecting : the ones who want to buy a device without 1000's extra (useless for some?) gizmos. The same thing can be seen in cars and many other products. For example, it is harder and harder to get a car with manual control for windows... its all that electrical control now... Same thing with vans with 2 sliding doors instead of just one... some people have no use for the 2nd one, but must pay the increase price though...
What I guess I'm suggesting is that companies can continue to add gizmos as much as they want, but they should keep in mind that their are some customers who are more "traditional" and would like only the basic functions.
DrkBr
get rid of marketing-driven technology
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
We had a guy buy a copy of Windows 95 when it came out, and then called our University computer support center to as them what he should do with it. Turns out he didn't even own a computer.
There are a whole lot of very stupid people out there, who are perfectly willing to give their money away. If you don't take it from them, someone else will...
>most people want cell phones that do one thing - make calls
That's a myth. Most of those people who say that are not heavy customers for cell phones anyway. They are the types that stick with their 4-year-old fat candy bar phone that does nothing. The manufacturers need to cater to actual customers, not just "most people." The valuable customers are ones who upgrade often, buy add-on services, etc.
Also phone companies need to have cool features to maintain their image in the market. Being outmoded in a high-tech market place is not cool. The high end phones convey an image that helps sell the low end phones. So in that sense things like the N-Gage are good.
who are simply impressed by complication. Rube Goldberg devices actually have a market. Maybe not a huge all encompassing market, but a market nonetheless.
As an engineer I appreciate simplicity and it's much, much harder to design a simple device that does the same thing as a complicated one.
One of the things I do is design and build human powered machinery. I have a particular fondness for Human Powered Vehicles. I've played around with a lot of front suspension designs, mostly just for fun and personal edification, but the one that's really serious has the entire front suspension whittled down to a single part. Just one. A shaped composite leaf spring with a bit of damping material in its core. The two front wheels (it's a trike, two in front, one in back. Morgan style) basically just get stuck on the ends of the spring.
People who look at my machines completely ignore this lovely bit of work and Ooo and Ahhhh over all the complicated tubular multilink stuff that I put together more as a testbed for formula car suspension systems.
If I were to sell my machines I'd hazard a guess that the complicated beast would outsell the superiour, but simpler machine.
See all those folks out riding the paved roads on 40 pound, double suspension, downhill mountain bikes and wondering why they can't keep up with their friend's rusty old "ten speed"?
KFG
I wonder...Are these companies actually patting people down to make sure they're not "carrying"?
What?
Nielsen has a postdoctorate degree in computer science ...
A postdoctorate degree? What is his title, SuperDoctor, or maybe UltraDoctor? What institution grants such degrees and how many decades of study is required to get one? Do I have to prove P = NP? I hope that you at least get a nice diploma out of it. Ideally, it would be a laser-engraved slab of Lucite...
Microsoft's first "Natural" contoured keyboard was a well-designed product, and I could find no fault with it.
But over the years, MS "improved" it by making the function keys smaller, adding a row of multimedia keys, moving the adjustable feet from the front to the back, and worst of all, removing the "insert" key and rearranging pgup/pgdn/home/end/delete and the arrow keys. I refuse to adapt to this latter perversion.
I would gladly pay $100 if I could find an unopened "first generation" Natural keyboard.
it's simply not true, do some research! You can transcode, the problem is that nobody wants to, since, well, it's transcoding! You lose quality. Besides WMA and AAC doesn't really have that much to do with the DRM that they are using anyway.
I just want a cell phone with linux installed. Am I too demanding?
I have nokia 5510, it has a keyboard and 64 MB of memory. That's plenty of room for linux.
When they will give me what I want?
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
I love my v60i. No polyphonic midi ringtones. No color. No bluetooth/irda/wifi. No games. Just a flip phone that has the useful features. 3 voice dialing. It was something like $20 with a 2 year contract. Maybe its time to switch providers?
Douglas P. Price
Actually no, this does not solve the problem. It has nothing to do with people being sheep. It has to do with manufacturers deliberately removing simple products to justify higher prices. The simple products people want ARE NO LONGER BEING OFFERED FOR SALE. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, Canon replaced the simple i450 printer with the more complex and expensive i470 printer that adds no true functionality and has more moving parts to fail. The i450 is GONE. Canon took it out of production. The option to buy it is not there.
Extra features I can live without...
I just don't like shelling out money for something that turns out to be broken when it comes out of the box or shortly after.
1 RCA D52130, 52" Projection television. Less than a year old and one of the tubes fried. It was still under warranty, so I thought it wouldn't be a problem. Part replacement time? 5 to 6 months minimum. I hounded the store where I bought it from until they took it back.
replaced it with:
a Samsung TXM3096WHF. Sure it was smaller, but I had no interest in getting another projection TV. Less than a year later the tube in this one is showing a green hotspot on the right side. The longer the screen is on, the uglier the color gets on that side. It has to be sent back to Samsung for servicing or replacement.
Maybe I'm just cursed, but it seems like so many products are crapping out too quickly these days.
Microsoft's first "Natural" contoured keyboard was a well-designed product, and I could find no fault with it.
Only if it is the only keyboard you ever use. However, if you go to someone else's keyboard (which will not be "Natural"), you hare having to deal with two incompatible keyboard interfaces.
what can i tell them to make them apprecerate the unatural shape of the people on the screen.
i tried "don't they look fat?"
But maybe the customers are their own persecutors, since they are attracted by all these new features, etc. So, why are they frustrated? May be they are not really clever and probably not more than the marketers...
Is the market for new, flashy, kinky features full products is bigger than the market for well designed products?
The problem is that one man's simple includes a bluetooth feature and another man's simple includes 802.11b, and another man's simple... The fact is that it is far cheaper to market and distribute one device that does everything than a bunch of variations on "simple". Production cost is practically irrelevant these days, but part of the reason it is practically irrelevant is the economy of mass. Divide that mass into 10 different ideas of "simple" and suddenly production will bite you too.
the world is stupid...
which end up doing nothing more than increasing costs ... cell phones
What?
Cell phones are CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP. A lot of the time companies will PAY you to take the phone if you sign up for a plan. I got a Siemens SL56 for free + $100 back when I signed up for a year of service.
As for "making them more complicated", that's bull. Besides the PDA/Phone/Game Console hybrids, every cell phone I've seen has been insanely easy to call from. Press numbers, press "call". Wau! And if you don't want all those features, then (intuitively enough) don't BUY a phone with them! I didn't need a camera or bluetooth or anything, so I didn't buy a phone that had those features. There are PLENTY of them out there.
I spent my college years working food service (waiting tables, bartending), and retail sales. When you have to deal with the general public, you really get your eyes opened as to the high level of stupidity out there. From complex things, to just every day common sense situations, I was shocked and amazed at how low the common denominator was out there.
Sometimes, I wonder how so many of us survive the world as long as we do these days....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well, if your stupid enough to think you bought an HDTV when you havn't, you deserve to be ripped off.
:P
My cell phone still makes phone calls just fine.
Heh, Starbucks All I want is a large coffee. Not a Venti coffee, not a Talle coffee, not a biggie coffee, not a grande coffee. Just a large black coffee. "Do you wnat room for cream, sugar, carmel shots, donuts floating on top?" "No lady, all I want is a large BLACK coffee" Why is this so hard to understand?
"What can be done to make manufacturers get
their heads into the real world?"
What's to keep consumers from making intelligent decisions in the marketplace? That's what free market capitalism is about, after all.
If your customer is a self-important, lazy, unconcerned idiot; unable to say 'no' to something they know is a crap product, I say businesses should be able to do what they want, concurrent with the law.
Those 15% of the people that think that they have an HDTV, probably bought something that was overpriced, and might end up buying equipment that would only work to it's fullest with a HDTV system.
Now there's a customer list that's worth paying good money for.
I saw some dude with a video camera that recorded at 16:9...he said it was High-Def...yeah right.
"All I want is plain coffee with milk and sugar. No latte , no expresso, No mocca , no nothing..."
Heh, try to get a Quarter Pounder without cheese...The employee will have a stroke. The cash register starts on fire. It sometimes take three "managers" to verify the order.
What?
I refer you to the following jingle by Paul Anka & Lisa Simpson:
Paul Anka: To stop those monsters 1,2,3,
here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free.
It's got Paul Anka's guarantee
Lisa: Guarantee void in Tennessee!
Both: Just don't look, Just don't look,
Just don't look, Just don't look
It worked for Springfield... sorta
What ever happened to making such things so they work both left AND right handed? The scroll mice are right-handed only: when your index finger is on the left button, your ring-finger off in thin air. Standard mice are ergonimically correct, kludgemice are not. They are a downgrade.
Bottom line: we're going to see a lot more of this as companies decrease their times to market, the latter fueled by the miniaturization and convergence of everything digital.
In all of this, it's a shame that true interaction design isn't playing more of a role.
Interaction designers (read Alan Cooper's "The Inmates are Running the Asylum, for more)deal with "how software behaves". Interaction design looks at what the *goals of the user* are. These goals are surmised after intense, up close work with customers. They result in rich templates that are followed *to the letter* by the developer - and, most importantly, this process *works*!
The end result is a very strict template that *directs* the software/hardware developer. It's much like a rendering of architectual plans for a home contractor. Here, the architect, after consultation with her client about *how* the home is to be used, and what the occupants *personal goals* are in that use, comes forward with a design that is followed *to the letter* (no deviation) by the contractor.
Consider the interaction designer and software/hardware developmer in a relationship much like the architect/homeowner.
BTW, there is no putting the systems architect in place of interaction designers. Systems architects - with exceptions for those who have an innate gift that mimics the best interaction design - are at fault, too. (There are always exceptions to the rule, but the bulk of rotten UI in all products proves my point)
There is simply no excuse for the continuation of faulty UI and confusing feature sets. The only reason this continues is because we continue to pay attention to the promises of marketers. We're adapting to less-than-optimal user experiences, in engineering-driven product scenarios. This will change in one of two ways: we will either adapt to poor interface, or the smart companies will realize that the real value in a product is what - in essence - defines a killer app...i.e., making a product enable an activity that one already engages, *easier*, or a new activity *easier* in ways that make the user want to dispense with the old activity.
Developers need to be following strict interaction design templates, period. No more "let's throw in this or that feature" if it is outside the boundaries of the *goals* of the target audience. Developers and product marketers, driven by the insane and increasing speeds of markets, are developing willy-nilly, with no thought to theh user experience.
Read Cooper's book for more. Every product developer should have it on his/her shelf.
" As an example in the article, most people want cell phones that do one thing - make calls"
The first cell phones did this. It wasn't until their popularity made the product so successful that now they're searching for new ways to get a new wave of customers buying new phones. (Notice I used the word 'new' a lot? That was on purpose.) They're searching, and when they find that must-have feature, things will calm down back to simplicity.
I think their point is valid, I just thought this was a dumb example. Cell phones won't go extinct over this. If the had a similar story for say TabletPCs, I'd agree. It's for similar reasons to what CNN mentioned that the Palm mopped the floor with the Newton.
"Derp de derp."
I work for a wireless carrier and can tell you one basic reason phone manufactures add these features. Wireless carriers ask for them! The wireless carriers want these features in the phones they sell so they can charge you for the services that go along with them. Who wants MMS if you don't have pictures to send? Who wants wireless internet if you don't have a web browser? The bottom line is that phone manufacturers don't sell phones to the end users, they sell them to wireless carriers.
But perhaps perspectives are skewed for most
I'll tell you what... you give me your GPS mobile communications server the size of a matchbox, and I'll let you lug around my "just make a call" phone with no added features (except call waiting - whoohoo!)
Nothing, it's ok. Just don't buy if you don't like!
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
It's just like perl philosophy says: "Make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible."
Trivial things like turning on your cell phone should be obvious - you shouldn't need a manual. This should not be compromised in the name of harder things like playing games or browsing the web. It's okay to make the user consult a manual for those.
And if you're supporting those harder things, you must have a comprehensive manual, because the people who want to do the harder things will, in the end, read it.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Keep It Super Simple
;-)
It's also sometimes fun to kiss an electrical outlet. Or Michael Jackson
Ok, couldn't resist a bad MJ joke.
"640k should be enough for anyone."
Why is it assumed that no one needs or wants the new features? Maybe people like me who don't buy a new phone every year. But those people don't matter.
Features like polyphonic ringtones, Java games and cameras are targeted at cell-phone power users: teens. On the other hand, business types want better connectivity options, calendars, wireless Internet access etc. By introducing more features targeted at these two groups the cell-phone makers increase their sales.
Speaking of cell phones without cameras, can anyone suggest a good one? I have T-mobile as my cell phone provider and am currently using the free Motorola 330 that I got for signing up. Either it's just a crappy phone or I've dropped it too many times, but it constantly disconnects in the middle of phone calls. I'm planning on getting a new phone, but all I'd use it for is plain-old phone calls. Any suggestions?
Don Norman, a colleague of usability expert Jakob Nielsen (who is quoted in the article), has a great essay about "activity-centered design" and the highly-usable Harmony Remote Control.
- Less battery life
- Not easily viewable in sunlight
- Not water resistant (even I don't understand this one!)
Manufacturers seem to have forgotten the purpose of mobile phones.Same issue with laptops. I have an pismo laptop from 4 years ago with as much as 10 hours of battery life. If there exists such a system today, I'll buy it but marketeers find it easier to push Ghz, so we get Ghz. This reminds me of radios from the 1960s when boasting "10 transistors" was so important that some manufacturers soldered in dummy transistors!
Why is it so hard to bundle a normal ringtone or two with a cell phone? My new-ish T610 plays salsa, reggae, and a couple corporate jingles, but there's not a single normal cell phone ring. Are people who want a phone to sound like... well... a phone really in the minority these days?
People will not buy crap if they know it's crap. But markets operate imperfectly in an environment that doesn't have perfect information perfectly distributed.
It's impossible to know just by looking at a product if it's any good. For that you have to have credible reviews or experience that'll guide your decision. The consumer magazines do a fair job in that regard but the best sources I've found have been forums dedicated to a particular topic. Even there, you need to be careful not to give credence to comments from vested interests - such as a reviewer being somehow compensated by the manufacturer of the product he's reviewing or manufacturer flunkys hanging out in newsgroups.
I guess I see it as a market opportunity. Adding features allows companies to increase raise prices, jack up margins, and carve out marketing niches. If the consumer really doesn't want those features tho, it's an opportunity for Simple Product to position against Complicated Product.
Most market research currently shows that male consumers want features, because they think they're getting more for their money. Women, on the other hand, seem to want simplicity. Ask any woman what she thinks of her man's home theater system and you'll get a big ol' eye-roll.
laugh hard, it's a long way to the bank
Why would manufacturers want to get their heads into the real world? If they can do things like get consumers to (potentially) pay for tech support instead of finding answers in a decent manual or if they can get people to think they have an HDTV when they don't, then they've got a pretty good thing going. The only recourse is if they're being deceptive or vague on purpose, and then force them to get it together.
More important, I'm afraid, is that people should stop wanting crap they don't need.
People have proven sheep like enough that the marketers have learned to pump demand for products that have no particular value. It's no longer even about supplying consumer demand. It's about coming up something vaguely novel and then figuring out how to manipulate people into buying it.
This is the dark side to the free market that the PR flacks have polished up and convinced enough people that it isn't really just a smoother piece of shit.
For the free market to really produce value to the customer the customer must insist on spending its money only those things that return value in some way. If it will buy any old thing that's "Ooooo, shiney," then what the market will produce is a lot of shiney, cheap to produce, high priced junk.
And the market, I'm afraid, is driven by the average Wal-Mart shopper these days.
Is it any wonder that the cell phone manufacturers might get confused if people don't snap up their N-Gages, now with the slice and dice feature?
KFG
Sneakers?
Lying to customers to gain a sale is generally looked down upon and usually illegal, even in the most capitalistic societies.
Most of them actually want cameras and whatnot built into their phones. Maybe you don't, but that makes you the minority. There were phones without cameras for sale and some with. Those with sell better. Deal with it. You want to boycott them now? I doubt any of the manufactureres will lose any sleep over that.
i have a cellphone and i could never figure out how to lock keypads. i went through menu several times, but nothing yielded. then i felt, may be it is not there. after few months, my 14 month old son was playing with it and then i saw the status "keylocked"! This happened couple of times and finally i had to google to locate the manual online and do pdf text search to find out. the instruction was "press menu key for longer than 2 seconds"!
You know, what would be really be something is a cell phone that actually worked! One that wouldn't break the first time you dropped it, that would get usable reception (even in my apartment), was small enough to fit in my pocket, and was easy to use.
Why is that asking so much? I don't need a camera and don't care about playing games or any of the other junk they put in cell phones now.
Imagine if the development time taken to add all these extra features was instead devoted to actually making the damn thing stable and reliable!
Well, the real trouble is that they are putting more effort into having a long feature checklist to put in the sales pitch, of course, plus as repeatedly mentioned that people buy based on the feature checklist, not a lot of time spent "test driving".
Did you ever spend time in an electronics store looking at the remotes and panel controls and asking "what's this one do"? The salesmen generally don't know. They know how to read you the feature checklist.
But electronics manufacturers would put in better controls if it weren't expensive and hard compared to a minimal number of buttons.
They all have to put in the same (or about same-priced) chip to run the remote or digital watch or cell phone. The chip gives them the feature checklist ("DVD also plays MP3! And WMA!") everything after that is expense with very little selling power.
A wheel to scroll through menus faster? Way more expensive than one button you have to hit over and over and over.
Six buttons and a wheel on your digital watch so each button doesn't need three modes? Extra five dollars to manufacture. And higher failure rate.
We now have an industry full of chips that double in brainpower every two years, but their connections to the outside world remain the same cost. So you have the same four buttons to access 97 features on your digital watch that used to have six features.
None of which explains why my now-dead 1990 Quasar VCR had a brilliant little button where one press meant "record now, current channel, for a half hour" and successive presses upped that to a hour, 90min, 2 hrs, etc. The button beside it, you could hit first, to delay recording to the next even half-hour, 2 presses to an hour, etc. These two buttons handled 98% of my timed-recording needs. Every VCR since has required me to go to a menu to set the start-time to the minute, then the duration to same.
Why did this not become universal? I have no idea. Because they're stupid about human factors?
It doesn't have an addressbook, it doesn't have a calculator, and it won't play against you in Battleship or Mini Golf. It will only make phone calls, to your mother or a 24hr concierge service in over 100 countries.
And it'll only cost you a cool $5000+
http://www.vertu.com/vertu/panel.html
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
People stop buying crap they don't want. Problem solved. Too bad people are sheep Change "want" to "need" and I'd agree with you.
and they do it because it works more often than not.
"Do you want fries with that?"
Sounds pretty simple, right? If you say yes they just made a huge increase to the profit of the sale. Same thing with "Super Sizing"
The markup on soda and fries is insane.
Here's one that may hit a little closer to home...
One keg == (1920 oz. / 16) == (120 pints * ~$4.00) == $480.00. The average cost of a keg is $120.00
The first point is that product manufacturers are the ultimate democratic institution. They make what the consumers want.
But more to the point.
For years I would only purchase the cheapest possible microwave. Why? Because they had a knob, and NO temp control.
Microwaving turns out to be pretty non-exact science. I want my left overs heated, I want my popcorn popped.
In order to do this in a "good" microwave, it could take a half a dozen to a dozen gestures setting the time to the second (A totally useless time measure when cooking) and the tempreture to a specific setting (which has no human meaning whatsoever).
In a cheap microwave, it only took a single gesture. Turn the knob to about the right amount of time, and it turns on, cooks for the right amount of time, and shuts itself off.
A few years ago not even cheap microwaves came with knobs. There are a couple of Restraunt grade ones that do (They appreciate the minimum number of steps in a restraunt), but they are hard to locate and very expensive. But I was resigned to my purchase.
I moved into a new home, and it had a built in microwave. A really nice Sharp, with a TON of buttons. With horror I began schemeing how to get rid of the beast.
But the story has a happy ending. I still do exactly the same things I do with the microwave, heat leftovers, and pop popcorn. And the sharp has two buttons that do precisely that. It has a heat leftovers button. And it has a pop popcorn button. 1 Gesture, and now I don't even have to know "how long". The amount of technology to pull this off, is magnitudes greater than my old microwave, but nonetheless, nearly unbelievably my new microwave is simpler to use than the one with just a knob.
The marketplace has come to solve a problem I didn't even really know I had. To make my microwaving life even easier. As with all technology that I buy and love, it is exactly that power of the marketplace that gets me what I want.
Why make it harder to do the "dialing numbers" part of using a phone?
Dialing numbers? What is this "dial" you speak of?
-Drox (who actually has a working wall-mounted rotary-dial telephone).
I just want a keyboard that doesn't have media controls, IM, and Email buttons. Jesus christ I don't need another freaking app loading on startup. Volume control, email, homepage, etc, etc, etc. Can't I just have a keyboard (wireless would be nice) without all the freaking extras (besides wireless).
No, really. Marketing is all fine and dandy, but too often -- increasingly WAY TOO OFTEN -- it's used as an excuse to cheat people by thinking they're getting something they're not. These can be direct lies (battery runtime you get with a brand-new battery for a week, "120 megabytes") and they can be lies of omisssion (product does some task X, but only on Sundays or with the purchase of another product).
Unfortunately I don't have any realistic solutions, but the increasingly acceptable combination of "totally unethical" and "within the letter of the law" is the reason for much of this. It's not that manufacturers always make bad products or that they're always hard to use. They're just too often described as doing more, more easily, than they actually do.
The screen from my Sanyo 8100 makes a nice short-range flashlight. I've used it several times for finding my way around
dark buildings or hiking through woods on a moonless night. Since it has two screens (a large one and a small one) you get your choice of how badly you want to scrozzle your night vision.
What happens if somebody needs to get ahold of me? They call my house and leave a message. It's amazing how that works.
If they made a cell phone *just* for making calls, no extended contracts, a monthly fee of $15 for unlimited use and a phone that costs $50, I'd get a cell phone. Until then, I'll stick to my landline and the ubiquous pay phone.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The simple menu system, and simple set of buttons on the Ipod mimic what this article is trying to say the latest tech gadgets are not--user friendly.
If more companies tried harder on design and usage, specifically portable music players, there wouldn't be as many complaints.
On the Ipod you've got your forward/backward buttons, the play/pause button, the menu button, the blank (enter) button, and your simple-to-use scroll wheel.
Yet it does a lot. But it also can do the basic operations the consumer wants without him or her having to wade through menus and use various different buttons.
paul
funny on my last consulting job the people I worked with had all these very high tech japanese phones that did everything, but when we went into the elevators or below ground at the Chicago Daley Center their phones would stop working, but my very basic butt-ugly Motorola V120 was the only thing that could work. I'd rather spend money on having low-signal strength sensitivity than web browsing, cameras, modem jack, games, custom ring tunes & all that other crap
Article:
The data also showed that 25 percent of consumers thought they already owned a high-definition television -- the true number is less than half that.
Slashdot summary:
Also cited, 25% of people think they own an HDTV, when the actual number is less than 10%.
Did you know that there is a small coffee at starbucks? You have to ask for it by its proper Starbucks name - a short
It's not listed on the menu, and sometimes the people working there don't know about it, but it exists.
It's the same size as a kids hot cocoa - 8oz, as opposed to the Tall (12oz), Grande (16oz) and Venti (20oz) - Venti means twenty.
"What does this phone do?"
"Well, it makes calls, stores your phone book, and has this nifty flashlight."
I could see more people asking WHY the phone has a flashlight than thinking it to be a "Good Feature". Most folks would consider it an unneeded 'bell and whistle' feature that creates an excuse to charge $50 more for the phone. As opposed to:
"Well, it makes calls, stores your phone numbers, coordinates with your computer, plays games in full color, takes pictures of anything you see fit to take pictures of, sends them to any email address, allows you to play games whenever you are bored or want to spend sone time, lets you send an IM to unobtrusively keep in touch with your coleagues on the go, allows you to play realistic-sounding music for your ring tones, or even record your OWN sound for your ringer..." (And of course 50 other features that sound cool).
Now, see? THIS would strike people as "It does all that for only $99?! COOL!"... However, being able to -USE- all that without a doctorate is another matter for some folks.
Overall, it's simple: The more things they can put on paper under the "features" section, the more likely folks are to buy it if the price is decent, and they think the features will be fun. They never give the DETAILS of the features that would cause people to reconsider.
For example, when I worked for T-Mobile, I had to explain to folks that yes, they could "download" their address book to their phone, like it said in the features, but they had to do it two entries at a time from the T-Mobile web site. Oh, yes, and it used a SMS message to send each entry (At cost, oftentimes). And of course, nothing quite as fun as dealing with an upset parent whose daughter had used 13,000 SMS Text messages in one month by using AIM on her phone... It seems so SIMPLE, and easy to use... and makes a huge bill.
Overall, people are interested in INTERESTING bells and whistles. "I can get a digital camera for $199 or I can get a PHONE with a diital camera and all these other features for $150...", and a flashlight is not considered 'Interesting' to most people. ("I can get a flashlight for $5, or a phone with one for $150...")
@Whee
Manufacturers need to learn that in the information age (which is now!) they need to put more and more info on their websites.
Every product manual should be on the website in PDF!
Even the products that are ten to fifteen years old!
For an example of the best example of providing info, look at Yamaha. They have scanned every manual for every music synthesizer model and variation that they have made and have put these scans (in PDF format) on their web site for free download. Considering that this is refers to several hundred models each with manuals that have several hundred pages, this is incredible customer support!! I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Yamaha musical instrument new or used, for fear that I couldn't operate it.
Plus they did it knowing that it would take years to pay off in additional sales. Great company.
Now for the chumps! Fry's Electronics gets the price here. Every product , yes every product in the store should have a manual on-line on their website.
And,
Every product that they have ever sold in the past ten years should have the manual on their web site. Plus, there should be links to information that people always need to know when they buy stuff there. Like, what type of memory does this motherboard that is on sale this week use? And, 'Can I use this other type of memory for the motherboard that I bought at Fry's three years ago?'.
Usually at Fry's, nobody knows what the answer to your question is. So people buy the wrong product, can't figure out how to get it working, scoop up most of the parts, and bring it back for a refund. Then they put most of the parts back in the box, put shrinkwrap cellophane around it, and stick it back on the shelves at full price.
The only way to tell if the product at Fry's is a dud is by the ratio of returned units to the previously unsold ones. If half the boxes are user returns, don't buy it or you too will probably be back to return it. Like the saying goes: 'A trip to Fry's is two trips to Fry's'.
This monkeyshit mentality wouldn't be so bad if you're not driving fifteen miles each way.
And they could reduce this nonsense by demanding that each supplier provide a manual in PDF form and a list of FAQ that could be put on the Fry's website before the product goes on sale there.
But would they do it, no ef'in way. They just don't give a fuck!
So what't the point?
MORE DOCUMENTATION!
Please, someone, just make a damned cell phone. If I wanted a gameboy or digital camera I would buy one.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
Monolithic complexity usually expands out to less cohensive and decoupled forms. With mobile phones for example, we think that a kind of "personal area network" will happen so you do have separate devices (bare gsm phone, pda, game-boy, headphones, mic, watch, etc) that provide the same functions, yet are interconnected wirelessly: this means that the same complexity exists in the system, yet the user sees it another way.
Same happened for computers and software (monolothic mainframe applications -> distributed desktop applications).
Or remember eletronics pre 80's when things prosumer and above kit came with owners manuals that allowed you to field strip and repair the unit if need be? I'm thinking of those manuals that came with complete circut diagrams with all parts labled and a nice component list. This whay when something blew it was a 30 minute saturday project.
The more important distinction is I'm the owner not the user it's my gear I baught and paid for it. Someday we will get decent laws that make software a product not some vaporous IP that you only get a liscence to use at least for embeded stuff. And no I dont think it's should be required to incluse source code but I think I should be able to do anything with the binary sans giving it to other people.
No sir I dont like it.
For what it's worth, I got a Verizon contract at Radio Shack. This allowed me to actually get a b&w Motorola phone with no bullshit (although convincing the peddler that I really wanted this was annoying). The downside, of course, was having to go to Radio Shack (though for me, the convenient location tempered the depressing experience of being inside).
This phone is exclusive to Radio Shack (for reasons that become obvious on a moment's reflection, especially if you reflect while observing the RS clientele).
Something I've noticed is that the user interface on that phone is simply the best I've ever used. The automated text entry is much better than the crap LG(?) uses. The menus are concise and uncluttered. The datebook is even of marginal utility; this is nice for someone like me who decided that carrying around the Palm was ridiculous.
And what is with these games? Does anyone actually play, let alone buy those hideous things? It's really the IBM 8088 CGA shareware days all over again, except that it's foisted on me by the Powers That Be. I apparently can't even delete the menu option.
That depends where you live - if you live somewhere with little or no personal rights and personal freedom, like China, you might have that problem.
Of course, in the free world it is different - I still remember visiting the secured server room of a governmental facility, it was behind a 24h staffed help desk and with signs outside forbidding the use of cameras and mobile phones. Of course, being young and naive I was surprised when I noticed that one of the helpdesk people was using a webcam to update the live feed on her private home page.
It is a clear sign of the paranoia of the old communist regimes that they considered everyone a criminal, ie making controll of photocopiers an important task in the old USSR.
[only slightly tongue in cheek]
DVD players are one of the things that piss me off the most. While the picture/sound quality are better, the interface is so incredibly poor, I almost returned my player to the store to live forever with VHS.
I've worked in a large department store for five years now, and every year we make the same mistakes, and every year we tell district management about them, and every year they ignore us.
I live in Buffalo, NY. It snows here. A LOT. It usually doesn't hit us really bad until mid-January; we usually have non-snowy Decembers. We get in our winter boots in August and September, and we only get enough to sell to about 200 people at most. Our winter boots are ALWAYS completely sold out before christmas.
When the snow finally hits in January and February, we get 1000's of people running in looking for some boots because they lost their old ones and forgot to shop for new ones. So what happens? They don't get boots. We just don't have them. We have the worst winter weather storms going on outside, and our store is packed full of summer sandals in the beginning of January.
Fucking ridiculous.
It's not just our company though; EVERY retailer around here is like that. They're all run by morons or something.
True story: they made us come into work one day about 3 years ago, in the worst blizzard we've had in over 10 years. There was a driving ban out, and we ended up with over 6 feet of snow. Do you want to know what I did all day? I put up a nice display of speedo bathing suits that wouldn't sell until 4 months later.
People who run businesses are so full of themselves that they literally have no concept of what is going on at the bottom line. They think that just because they got an MBA from a fancy school, they automatically know what's best.
I bought a new cel phone in hong kong over the holidays. Had all the big technical things I wanted, tri-band and unlocked so I can use it here and when I am in asia or europe with prepaid sims. Bluetooth for syncing with my pc and using as a modem for my palm. It has a beautiful color display that is viewable in sunlight. But the one thing that I cant stand about it is that there is a dedicated button for wap access, but the button to get to the phone book from the stand by screen isnt labeled, even on the screen.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
I think a lot of people like the glitzy slices/dices phones that are on the market now. And that's fine. I am glad there are manufacturers falling over themselves to saturate that market.
However, I feel there is a smaller market that likes simplicity. I just wish there was a niche player that went after this. With cell phones, that is... Apple has done a pretty good job with computer hardware/software and mp3 players. And they've got a successful business playing to that niche.
It's the same in every field... from movies and music, to cars and cell phones: just about every company feels immense pressure to go for the biggest piece of the pie. However the remaining pieces are valid and highly profitable markets. It would just take a diciplined (and probably privately held) company to maintain focus and keep costs down to dominate their niche.
Anyways... not sure exactly what my point is, but as someone who appreciates simplicity and quality, and has plenty of spending money, I feel I am not very well catered to by the current consumer market.
Cheers.
First if you buy a mass market electronic, it probably has a commodity base. This means that there are a few standard chipsets, or whatever, that give the basic functionality to the unit. it doesn't matter if the manufacturer does not want the feature, it would be expensive to not have the feature and make little sense not to implement the feature once you have it. This is why every TV has a sleep function. This is why most every camera has digital zoom. This is why almost every modern cell phone has a clock.
Then there are the profit driven motives. With phones these include text messaging, web browsing, and customized rings. Many customers do not want these. However, the phone company is not going to want to sell a phone without these features. Such a phone represents lost revenue potential.
The stupidest thing in the article is the assertion that simple things cannot be bought. This is absolutely wrong. Simple things are often more expensive, but they can be had. These simple products generally represent a high quality factor and tend to fall outside the realm of mass market consumer product. If any of y'all remember the discussion of cameras a while back, you will remember that a digital point and shoot is around the same price as a traditional Nikon camera body. Most people who are going to spend that kind of money will have the digital camera and ignore the useless features. Complaining about this is like complaining about a kitchen you never use.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
As an example in the article, most people want cell phones that do one thing - make calls. Yet phones come with games, instant messaging, cameras, etc. You can't even buy a simple cell phone any more.
This drives me insane. I want a phone. I want it to do THAT one thing. And I want to leave out ALL the CRAP so they can make it fit in my wallet about like a credit card. Can I get that? Hell No. Americas F'ed up sometimes...
I have always believed that convience is the mother of invention. Combining gadgets is part of it. The more you can do with the one object you bring with you everywhere the more likely it will help you. You may not use all the functions when you first get it but like any good swiss army knife it can save you at important times in the unforseeable future. To be totally fair maybe most people won't ever use the features but that doesnt mean they shouldnt be there. Most people just use the Internet to send emails and a few webpages, does that means Newsgroups, IRC, and other assorted things that the "average joe" wouldnt use or know how to, not existed at all? I say be thankful that its there cause even if you dont use it today, you might use it tommorow
Trix are for kids!
Like you, I'll take a tri-mode phone the folds up so I can stuff it in my underseat bag on my bicycle and not worry about it getting scratched up. No BREW enabled downloadable useless bullcrap or polyphonic MP3 ringtones (unless it was a realistic wet farting sound so people would get away from me when I'm trying to talk on the phone ;) ). However, if somebody would attach a webcam, I would be interested in that. I've got gnomeeting at home so I could use that to videocon with the family while I'm stuck in some hotel on the road somewhere. .....problem is, now I'm communicating by internet instead of wireless network...so I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.
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A goal is a dream with a deadline
Its always fun to lend out an HP calculator and watch the person get frustrated because they can't add 2+2.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Try this.
Buying coffee in a coffee shop. All I want is plain coffee with milk and sugar. No latte , no expresso, No mocca , no nothing . just plain coffee with milk and sugar damn it. Unfortunately the 5+@rbuck5 salesgirl never understands this.
Then, quite frankly, you're doing something wrong. All you do is say "I would like a coffee." Then she'll say "What size?" Pick one. Done. You put the milk and sugar in yourself. Starbucks has always sold regular coffee.
I have an HDTV. It's a nice 63cm Philips, says "HDTV" at the front. About ten years old by now.
Nothing to do with the new standard, but I can see why more people than expected say they have one.
Remember the old "digital ready" speakers? I see a trend here.
Apple should bring that touch wheel to mobile phones also.
Here's my quick scetch about how those phones would look like:
http://koti.welho.com/tkoivul3/iPhone.jpg
Ofcource Steve and Jonathan could do much better.
So what's your problem, buddy?
Even if the price of this was $1000, I'd buy it. Of course it will never get made because fucking cell phone companies then could lock you into their contracts.
You don't know what HDTV-ready means.
I've used cellular phones since before any sort of digital network was introduced in the US. I find it very interesting that when I used to go and buy a cellular phone, the phone's reception was the main selling point. Now how many gadgets are included is much more important. None of the newer phones I've had work as well as the old OKI and Motorola (the ones made from helmet plastic) phones I used to use when it comes to making and receiving calls.
When looking at recent cellular, you must also note that it isn't even possible to choose which phone you'd like to use many times. A phone may be available and compatible with the cellular network you want to sign up for, but if that carrier doesn't offer it you are pretty much SOL. Even if you manage to find one which is not locked to another carrier, most carriers will refuse to activate that phone even though it will work on their network just fine.
That brings me to a big rip-off that the current companies implement in the US. Originally, you bought a phone for less than cost, but the cellular company made a profit through their 1 year contract. Later GSM finally made it to the US and introduced phones with no contract, but which were locked to the carrier that sold them. Most companies now sell phone which are both locked and require a contract (a double whamie) plus many carriers refuse to unlock the phone after they have recouped their costs on it. Furthermore, many companies will force you to enter a contract with new service regardless of whether you buy a discounted handset or supply your own.
This buisness of requiring new handset purchases all the time is not only unfair to consumers, it also helps to destroy the environment by introducing perfectly good handsets into our landfills because they have been made useless by the lack of available service.
Bjarne Stroustroup, the inventor of C++, is credited with having said:
I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.
Be careful what you wish for.
Of course, people have said this kind of things about lots of products, including amateur 35mm cameras. Strangely enough, some folks went to trouble of learning how to use them anyway. Those folks know how the complicated controls work.
That's when the industry changes the controls in the name of "ease of use", thus alienating not only the beginner, but also the person who knew what they were doing before.
One of the things that pisses me off about my digital camera is that I have to dig through menus to change settings like exposure, f-stop, flash on/off, etc. The camera supports them all in theory, but it is hard to use in practice. Let's see, click here, left, down down down, menu... whoops! Lost the shot.
There are cameras that have these controls now, but in my experience they are unjustifiably more expensive just for that design.
Stick to the metaphor, manufacturing guys. If it's a camera, it should be controlled like a camera, even if there's a computer on the inside. That means knobs and dials and stuff that is quick to get at, makes sense if you know what it does, and can be ignored if you don't. Just like the old days.
It is a question of letting the old dog use the new technology without having to learn the "new trick paradign" too. The functions are the same, why change the controls? What's next, point-and-click blenders?
On the other hand, the next generation of car drivers might need a gamepad instead of a steering wheel...
I have a professor who mentioned his cell is years old because all the new, small phones can't punch a signal through his house. He likes the big numbers and easy to hit buttons as well. I bet all the people I see at work during lunch time desperately trying to get a call out by standing near the window and finally going outside would appreciate it more than size as well.
Also, these stupid people drive prices down for the rest of us. I don't need a HDTV system but if the hordes of sheep all go out and buy them the price of HDTV systems will fall. Almost certainly the price of non-HDTV systems will fall even more, which is good news for me.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I am sure you want your manuals but why should I and the other 95% pay for that. Sell a detailed manual as extra and whomever want it can buy it for the full cost.
A vibrant after market is not a bad business strategy.
Help fight continental drift.
I see dozens of posts saying "people want simplicity." The article is ostensibly making that very point.
But you know what?
People BUY complexity. They could buy a Mac, but they buy the PC because it has 'more software'. They could buy a simple phone, but they buy the one with all the gee-wizz features. They could pay $10 for shareware, but they want Photoshop and Word.
On top of that, it's hard to make things simple. It costs more to make a product easy to use. (Especially with software, where cramming maximal items into the preferences panel seems to be an industry sport.)
People get what they pay for.
> You want these manufacturers to _not_ take advantage of the people dumb enough to believe they are buying something else.
Heh, reminds me of when I used to work at Best Buy and they would make us try to push Monster Cables on every customer because of their "superior sound quality". Make them pay an extra $40 for cables of which the average person couldn't hear any improvement. I always thought those Monster cables were such a scam.
No it isn't HDTV ready. Look close at the screen an you see REALLY BIG DOTS. No converter is goin gto make them really small dots.
The problem isn't really simplicity vs. complexity (as far as the consumer goes). It is an inability to customize at a reasonable cost.
It is infinitely easier to make one product with every bell and whistle known to mankind, than build several products to fill a nitch markets (economies of scale and so forth). Manufacturers are keeping it simple as far as production goes: build One with Everything. Every feature a consumer (god I hate that word) wants is included, and that same model fills the demands of another consumer even though their needs are different.
Well, except for simplicity, but that is a really small segment of the market.
Also, price of admission. Value is sometimes denoted by how many features I could buy with x amount of dollars. As the list of features goes up, the perceived value also increases. It doesn't matter if I use those features or not; I am getting more for the same amount of money; an increase in value.
Scaling that backwards, a simple product becomes nearly worthless to sell. If x product has all these features, a person (much better word) nearly expects a significant reduction in price if product y doesn't have all those features. Except product x was sold with a specific price point in mind. To sell below that is unprofitable.
Example: when I was shopping around for a HD, the best price I could find for a 20GB (what I needed) and a 120GB were nearly the same. To sell the 20 GB at a comparative price would be around $24. Not even worth the cost of shipping at that point. Regardless of the number of features, the entry price of any product stays relatively static. A good CPU would cost the same today as five years ago (around $400). Except I can't even give my old one away. Scaling backwards makes it completely worthless.
The real problem is that people don't want to pay a lot of money. Therefore, someone makes a crap phone but it's cheaper than that more expensive phone over there. The company making the (crap) phone really doesn't care about it's customers being happy, all they care is that they sold a (crap) phone.
Pretty soon, the makers of the good phones see that the crap phones are flying off the shelves (because so many people have to buy replacement phones) so they decide to market a cheaper (crappy) phone. Since they are cheaper, they sell better and as a result they decide to stop making the good phones. (Or they make one or two that are almost impossible to find and are really expensive because they are making less of them)
Now let's say bluetooth get's big and I really want it in my phone. I have a good phone, got it back when they still made good phones. So I go back to the company that made my original phone (because I had a good experience) and get a new phone with bluetooth. The only problem is now it also has an mp3 player, camera, games, color screen... all the things I don't really want but I really want the bluetooth so I buy it. However, it lasts just as long as the waranty because now it's a crap phone. So I buy another one convincing myself that it was a defect or something and the next one will be better. This goes on until I get upset about it and spend the rest of my life trying to find a better phone. I then find a good phone but the service I have is a 5 year contract and they are raping me in "service" fees. However everyone is doing it so I don't really have a choice in the matter.
This is happening everywhere. Companies are realizing that they will sell more stuff if it breaks easier because few companies are making quality stuff. But I digress...
Consumers neet to stop impulse buying! And they need to stop shopping at walmart! Walmart is the biggest hinderence in this area because they say "We won't sell your X unless you sell it to us for Y" Therefore the company has to find some way of selling it for Y which usually involves making it with cheaper (and less durable) components and usually in a foreign country. So remember, next time you are shopping at Walmart "because it's cheaper" you are helping to make crappy things.
What's sampsonite? Maybe you meant Samsonite.
(I'm not trying to say you're dumb as well), I agree, there is a lot of idiots out there.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
I bought an HDTV-enabled TV (that is, one with a monitor capable of displaying HDTV resolution but without an HDTV receiver) a few months back. In looking around, I found it easy to determine whether the receiver was integrated or not just by looking at the feature card.
So you think that that's not enough? Well, I'm sorry, but I can't see any simpler way that the TV's could be advertised. Maybe you could draw a line in the sand between "HDTV Television Set" and "HDTV-ready Television Set", but you know what? At least among my A/V enthusiast buddies, an HDTV monitor (see above defintition) is an HDTV. If you couldn't be bothered to have a salesman explain it to you in 15 seconds at Best Buy, there you are.
BTW, I'm sure in a Communist society, the companies would be sure to fully inform the customer about HDT- oh, that's right; in a Communist society you wouldn't have HDTV. I forgot. Maybe you're ascribing the evils of humanity to capitalism.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Over here in Europe (and I guess Japan as well), talking on the phone - anywhere anytime - has been a non-issue for over 5 years. We really do want new features. Camera phones make sense. I'm not bringing my $1k Powershot G5 with me to everywhere. A camera that is always with me has value, even if it's a shitty camera. Definitely moreso because it's integrated with the phone, quick to take pictures with and I can send the pictures to my computer from wherever I'm at.
My father has an SLR for serious shooting and a pocket camera for random photographs. Similarly, I have the G5 and a camera phone.
I'm not denying that phones might have usability problems. I've personally had quite a few problems operating Samsung and Ericsson phones. Nokia seems to be much better in this regard. They have a consistent and logical UI. But do not be turned off of new features just because you've only seen them coupled with a crappy UI. And definitely do not blame the technology for stupid business decisions made by the phone companies ("receiver pays" and shitty interoperatibility).
Oh, and boo @ slashdot. I tried to use the Euro sign, but it was rudely ripped out. This is ridiculous. $ is not the only currency in the world, you insensitive clods.
Got to agree with you here. Officially at work we aren't allowed to have cameras or recording devices. Unfortunately my palm (tungsten t) and phone (nokia 3650) both break these rules. I looked around for a good phone with just bluetooth and to be honest I'm having a tough time looking for anything without a camera anymore. I'm having to buy a discontinued model (t39 from Ericsson). I'm at a government site but I can't imagine that they are the only ones banning these technologies.
Ever been to Intel?
Microwaving turns out to be pretty non-exact science.
Some people would beg to differ. You can even do dal.
Or you could try microwave cooking for one, surely a popular choice on Slashdot.
Da Blog
Actually, if you use OS X you will see that when you drag a disk, the Trash icon changes to an eject icon, seems pretty logical to me.
I think that's misleading. My TV is "HDTV-Ready". Who spends all that money on a TV and then doesn't get cable or satellite? And since the latest converter boxes you get from those services are HDTV converters, whoala, I have an HDTV, and I didn't have to buy a set-top box. It would have been a waste of money to do so. Now I have up to 1080i, On Demand (not HD), and all the HD stations are stunning in native 1080i or up-res'd 720p.
So "I have an HDTV", but I bet by their measurement I'm one of those duped consumers because my TV is only "HDTV Ready". Yet buying a full-blown HDTV would've been a waste of money after Comcast bypasses it for their own converter. I think the real dupe is getting people to pay for a converter when it comes automatically with most digital cable or satellite services now. The charged more for it a few years ago, but now it's only a few dollars more than renting the analog box, throw in On Demand, and buying your own HDTV tuner or full blown HDTV with internal tuner is, again, a waste of money.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
EVILVIPER's
RULE OF SIMPLICITY:
Each button must have no more than two functions.
Buttons must be labeled, in high-contrast colors, and the label must not wear-off, ever.
The more commonly-used the button, the larger it should be, and the closer to top-center it should be.
I may be leaving some minor points off, since this is just from memory, but if manufacturers would just follow the simple steps above, the world would be a better place.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Let's be honest here. Most remotes are fairly complicated, and often require some thinking to figure out how they work. Any five year old will usually get it working within a mere hour, at most. Now, if a 5 year old can do it and a 50 year old can't what does this mean?
As someone who is not a psychology student, but does know a bit about mental development (and I do mean a bit) let me take a guess:
The five year old has no predisposition to a certain method of interface. His mind works quicker and more efficiently than the 50 year olds, so he is able to overcome his tastes quickly and figure out the intended method of use.
He's not smarter, he's just not as damned stubborn.
Sometimes I find remotes difficult to master, often I will spend as much as 5 minutes at a friends house trying to find the play symbol (I think I am visually inept). But I never consult a manual!
Some people have made themselves so afraid of technology that they refuse to learn it. But the facts of life are this, new stuff means new knowledge to use it.
Sometimes interfaces have to be changed for improvements sake, it's not the end of the world.
Now I will be off to go pick up a new cell phone. I'm getting the LG VX4400, because it offers something I have wanted for along time: PC connectivity. I can get a USB cable and transfer files to it (such as adress book, and pictures, and polyphonic ringtones). It also is tri-mode, not dual-mode (shit and analogue happen). It features a 16bit screen, NICE!
I think documentation is behind in the tech world though. Companies need to support their products better. Release fewer products and provie full support. This means it works on every architecture it's physical interface will allow for, and it works in every OS you can run on those (except the obviously deprecated (MS-DOS 5 and earlier, they should still support 6.22 for some things).
if it doesn't have a manual, it's too complicate for the designer...
What I find surprising is that almost nobody sees that the cell phone is going to become a general purpose personal computer in the next few years. The interface obviously still needs a lot of work. But many people always carry a cell phone everywhere, wheras laptops are still only brought along when necessary. Within a few years cell phones are our wearable computers.
macdonalds hamburgers are really that big, or healthy.
macdonalds is *everywhere*
it's all a matter of perception.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I read somewhere today that the lowest common denominators of our society begin breeding at an average age of 15 and have twice the number of offspring that a typical college graduate, who on average, begins reproducing at the average age of 30.
Just think about all the people on wellfare and living on our handouts. The numbers have been growing at an alarming rate, and will continue to do so until our current system is crippled.
I just hope they don't eat us for our braainz.
My grandpa finially called the manufacture of his cell phone and had the lady open the manual to page 68, and then asked her to explain how to delete something from the directory. She finially admited the book didn't show how. (but not until he forced her to the end of her script that the instructions are on page 68). 2 pages (including cartoons) and all they did was tell you that you could delete an entry, and define delete.
At least they took the time to write a 100 page book, but it would be nice if they had taken the time to make sure the book told you how to do something.
When I worked at mcdonalds (albeit this was almost 10 years ago) we had a button for the quarter pounder and one for the quarter pounder with cheeses.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
... I remember that each courses first couple of classes were always devoted to see how to use the instruments.
It turned out that one teacher exasperated of this told us on one class why that was... Every class may have different devices (osciloscope, i.e.) and because its usuall that different brands can not use same ordering of plugs and stuff because they would be infringing in some kind of patent...
That thing about the "end" button just shows me how far things can get...
I expect that in fear of infringing a patent, they didnt label a red button "off"...
it might have been another reason, but still...
errera hunamum ets
Everytime your add new feature, remove/hide an old one.
Now, the article only hinted at 10% who actually had an HDTV. But, another probelm are those people who have an HD-capable monitor/TV and are only watching DVDs, and/or SD digital cable/DirecTV on them and they think they're watching HDTV--NO YOU'RE NOT! Unless the signal broadcast is at an HD resolution (**cough** Fox widescreen), into a monitor/TV capable of displaying a full HD resolution (a 42" plasma most of which are only 850x480 resolution (aka EDTV) doesn't count), then, you are watching HDTV.
But, since the broadcasters/content providers seem to abhore new technology, don't look for anything to change (see. Broadcast Flag, PVRs w/o Firewire, etc.)
Some days I feel like Schrodinger's cat.
I agree with everything in the article, but they didn't explore the difference between what people *said* they wanted, and what they actually went out and paid for.
/.) will but their money where their mouth is.
People say they want fewer features. But not many (except on
I have unfortunate priviledge to know a number of people who will never be able to learn anything on their phone past dialing, but who must have the most recent and feature packed phone, soley for status/fashion purposes.
If you're a manufacturer - what's there to do?
Listen to what people "say" and make simple elegant phones that only sell to design nerds?
Or listen to what people "do" and make feature packed albatrosses that sell to a mass market obsessed w/"what can it do?"
The choice is clear. We have met the enemy and it is us.
mlylecarlin
stop buying things. seriously. dont buy a cell phone unless your old one is dead. check product reviews online before buying *anything*. return anything that doesnt work exactly as you expected it to. this might sound a bit extreme, but americans are totally hooked on the whole consumer culture thing. hopefully the rest of the world will be able to avoid getting sucked into it like us.
even though they're cost is next to nothing
And before anyone points it out, yeah, I know, it's their, not they're.Figures - the one time I skip previewing and just submit.
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There is a lot of simple tech's. Just take a look at this mobile phone. Price will be in range $30-40 http://www.unian.net/ukr/news/news-50077.html
Cellphones/gizmos with larger buttons so that people with big fingers and/or bad eyesight can actuate them.
You got the easiest!!!
THE SIMPLEST COMPONENTS IN THE WORLD!!!
KISS!!!
What the hey, I've got Karma to burn...
Schnapple
"It's a computer, that's what it is. It's got menus and menus. I have to consult a manual anytime I try other features and then I forget how to do it," Sherby said. "If it takes that much effort to learn what to do, forget it."
That's why you take the low-tech approach and write the steps down on a little memo pad. Keep this pad in your pocket until you are ready to go it alone. See how easy that was? You don't have to crack open that manual to do the specific tasks you wanted or needed from your device.
This all reminds me of the morons who would call technical support, over a self-created problem, every week, wanting to be walked through the same exact steps as every other call they made. They would go so far as to pretend to write the steps down when suggested. Other people would actually take this advice and you would never hear from them again.
The people who can't handle hi-tech gadgets are simply those who refuse to demonstrate any logical thinking outside of what they are forced to deal with. I don't care if you have a PHD and can re-attach nerve endings under a microscope, if you can't do the most simple, self-saving steps to prevent confusion in your personal life, you sir, are an idiot.
Concerning doctors, I picked a real geek doctor who plays FPS games online and loves technology. I know, with this guy, I will never have to worry about him using some antique procedure because he's quick to embrace new things. Something to think about when selecting services so critical to your health.
I think now the problem is that they removed the "quarter pounder" without cheese button. That's ok. I eat at Wendys now.
What?
Those 15% of the people that think that they have an HDTV, probably bought something that was overpriced, and might end up buying equipment that would only work to it's fullest with a HDTV system. They're making money off of the stupid.
Fraud occurs to smart people too. Some companies put "Receives HDTV signals" or some such statement, when they mean "Normal TV that can take HDTV input". Deception is fraud, and the govt should be intervening.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I have advice for you, go out there and buy it used from some moron who wants the i470 because Cannon says so. So you buy the i450 from him and you'll even do him a favor.
a lot of the people also want those features, or would be willing to buy the product at the price where those features can be added(so the alternative is to pay for nothing or pay for those features anyways.). If people really were sheep you'd still be paying 1000+$ for a mobile phone that barely did anything.
there are models like nokia 1100 that practically don't do anything else than make phone calls, however practically nobody wants to replace his/her existing phone with it(unless there's something seriously wrong with the old one and the individual wants a stripped down phone 'just because', hell, you can usually pick up a better phone for about the same money anyways).
also the added in capabilities don't really transfer straight to prices(the prices which you pay for the things when there's a law mandating that the phones can't be locked to certain operator) as electronics come cheaper and cheaper. and people ARE willing to pay ~200-300euros for a phone(there's several phones that have nearly identical feature-set apart from how they look, yet have almost 100e price difference). there's not much market for el cheapo phones around here anymore either as everyone has a gsm phone already(there's market for cheapish phones though that's just cheapish phones with _new_ bling bling features but not for outright cheap as in stripped).
me? I practically had a 3110(that pretty much only makes phone calls and has crappy sms) in use till last summer(the 3110 was introduced when? 1998? 1997?) when I upgraded to a 3650, fell in love with it's features(irc, reading and posting to slashdot and ebooks while spending some time at grandparents doing some forestwork last summer). later I upgraded to n-gage(yes, upgraded. it is an upgrade if you look it like a geek because n-gage has more memory so using opera is possible when doing other things at the same time with it, also I like the pad more). What I'm waiting for is when the teen age group moves massively into using IM(irc, icq & etc) from their phones instead of using sms(which still is usually priced ridiculously high when you compare to the cost of just transferring data), people are already starting to see that the sms 'services' are ridiculously priced and everything they offer is pretty much offered on the internet just for the cost of data transfer.
what do normal young people aged like me(22) usually want with their phone nowadays around here? usability and bling bling(yes they do want that, sorry.). the camera carried in phone is for entirely different occasions than the ones you have the digicam for, though apart from 7650/3650/6600 they're pretty useless for even those occasions(and on 7650 the memory is too small too as it doesn't have mmc card support).
p800/900 might be intresting too but has just those few things that suck about it and it's expensive.
would you be willing to buy a computer that only ran microsoft office and nothing else? when the computer that ran all the normal stuff and had a free sdk(and lots of 3rd party apps) would only cost just few bucks more? I think we've been down that road(and no, computers aren't that much different in that aspect from mobile phones).
I remember a line from slashdot from few weeks back, said by someone in the 70's: "I don't know what the computer of the future looks like but I know what it will be called: a phone".
well, at least I like having 256mb of storage in my 'phone' and the sdk as well.. fuck if I really wanted to carry something around just for phoning I'd still use the 3110 as the primary phone, now I have something I can run a port of putty in if I need to(+I got enough mp3's for my listening purposes without needing to carry another device around to everywhere).
and if you just complain about lack of choice: tell your legislators that provider-lock in phones sucks. You're paying premium for that phone anyways when buying in a tie in deal(and really slows down the adaption anyways, lock in is illeagal here because it distorts costumers ability to evaluate the real prices you end up paying for the phone and service).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Sometimes it is useful to look at the mechanical predecessors of modern devices, before the microcontroller became common. My old mechanical 35mm SLR cameras were relatively easy to use. There might have been a few "mystery buttons", but most of the controls were straightforward. The camera was too stupid to have 12 modes. Each control was mechanically linked to the appropriate mechanism inside the camera. This prevented the engineers from making one button do 5 different things, dependent on the phase of the Moon.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?"
How about Economic down turn, depression, people walking around in potato sacks.
Yip, that would do it.
because it costs them nothing to include software that was already developed for previous products. They don't re-write all of the system and application level code for every new phone developed. They are building on a base of previously developed code, which includes all the stuff from the last version, plus newly developed apps for the new version. My cell phone cost $9, it has no camera or built in mp3 player, but it does have a color screen and text messaging, games, etc. That's apparently as simple as it gets these days.
TallGreen CMS hosting
The average IQ is 100 and this average represents a huge portion of the desired customers and anything more than ten percent off that mark (either way) will miss the intended target audience.
Modern high tech devices are getting more and more complex and difficult to understand from a conceptional point of view. The average consumer is hopelessly lost when it comes to understanding any of today's high end tech stuff.
The stuff is designed by incredibly smart people, but usually they don't know the average consumer's way of thinking, which is why dumb devices like iPods are so successful: They can be handled by the average joe.
"User interfaces should be well-designed and as simple to use as possible."
Jeff Raskin and Donald A. Norman already covered this. Something as simple as a door can be (and is regularly) goofed up. There also is apparently an anti-usability movement (much like anti-intillectual) afoot, were usability experts are treated with the same disdain that voodoo priest and witches are (read a KDE vs GNOME thread for some examples).
As an example in the article, most people want cell phones that do one thing - make calls. Yet phones come with games, instant messaging, cameras, etc.
I on the other hand want a phone that does instant messaging, e-mail, and irc. What I don't want is a phone that makes calls. I just don't use phones. I do use the internet.
I'll give you one word: design.
The quote at the end of the article gets it right: "The simpler it looks," Nielsen said, "the harder it is to build." Great design exudes simplicity, but it's surprising hard to get right. The iPod did a good job, by focusing on making music, and music alone, available through a simple interface. (I despaired to find you could maintain a calendar and play games on an iPod, but who does that? Fortunately these unnecessary features didn't interfere with the design too much.) My DirecTV DVR gets it mostly right too -- I shudder to think of all the things they could have added (partial show recording? a trashcan? games?) and I'm glad they didn't.
On the other hand (and as the article points out) every cellphone I've seen in the last two years has been a failure. The failure is not in QA, and it's not in documentation. It's certainly not in the user. The failure is in design.
Not only did I download the BIG QY10 manual from the Yamaha page (which I bought off eBay), AND the Tascam MR-8 fromn their page (Even though I sitll have the manual) and the Sony cordless phone, but I download every manual I can (the whole SDK for palm os, etc. etc. etc.).
This makes ME happy. And when you make me happy, I spend my money on you. It was so GRAND to leaf through the MR-8 manual pages to find out exactly what it can and can't do without sinking my money down and finding out I can't use it for the purpose I intended.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I want a single device that is essentially a hand held computer. Screen should be one of those new flexi ones so it be a decent size but still roll in/out of a compact device. The phone would just be one of the features. And, of course, it would run linux.
Don't add features to phones, make phone a feature.
I've actually had a similar discussion with a friend regarding the junk that gets packed into cell phones these days.
My take is that the phones are being marketed toward the wrong audience, generally speaking.
In Europe and Asian countries, the per capita use of public transportation is much higher than the usage in the United States. So it makes more sense to pack features into phones that will help the average person in those countries stay in touch or be entertained -- while making money for the service provider.
Since the United States has a much higher per capita use of private transportation (cars) it makes more sense for a company to offer more talk time, as playing games and sending IMs to friends is problematic while driving.
If a wireless company in the USA offered a $30 service plan that included 500 anytime minutes, nights and weekends free starting at 7pm and long distance included, with a basic phone that performed those functions, I think they would make a killing. Add the industry standard voicemail and caller ID and you'll be set.
Right now, I'm on SprintPCS and have a $29.99 plan with 300 minutes anytime, long distance, and nights and weekends free starting at 9pm along with the usual voicemail and caller ID. Not bad, but I'd upgrade in a minute (no pun intended) if a company offered a basic package similar to the one I described.
-Crolis
I have just gone through this dance myself. I wanted to get a cell phone that would allow me to make calls and receive calls. It took a lot of work and digging to get the one I ended up with. It's got everyhting and its brother (games, PDA, camera, web/email, text messaging, color screen, polyphonic ring tones (god help us!), blah, blah) but since the phone was free I don't really care. The only thing I do with it is make calls and receive calls. I did setup voicemail and you can text message me, if you reeally want to, but the idea of having the phone is to call me.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
How about a milkshake without the cup? (Thanks, Berkley!))
yes, but does it run linux?
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
The primary culprit here is probably the cheap EDTV (480p resolution) plasmas that Gateway and others sell. People think the have an HDTV because they shelled out $3000, but they do not. HDTV (720p or 1080i resolution) plasmas in general are >$5000. So in general buyer beware.
http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2004/januar y/idontneedmore
that post sums it up pretty nicely.
A classic example that springs to mind is the BMW iDrive, which has caused new Bimmer owners no end of frustration2 58226.html?from=storyrhs
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/20/1069027
Not wanting to be left behind, Mercedes Benz went ahead and designed a similar system. So you have a situation where two companies are competing vigorously against eachother without taking into consideration the needs and wants of their customers.
In this case, it has been reported that the consolidation of function controls onto one device have caused accidents.
That's beside the point tho - When you fork out the extra for a Merc or Bimmer you expect to get extra buttons to play with! Otherwise you'd just buy a Lada.
Sony Ericsson has had a mini led light available for some of thier phones. Not sure about recently, but they were only about $10 around the time that the t68 came out.
~Tommy Boomfiger http://www.gotapex.com/forums
flashlight?5 140/ind ex.html
check this:
http://www.nokia.nl/UK/Phones/PhoneModels/
I mean why the F cant they make just a plain, normal looking phone anymore? Even something like this that has very LIMITED and SIMPLE features, which I would be all about (I think a flashlight is an awesome idea), it still has to look like it's from the year 2057. Seems to be quite a trend these days with cars also. I dont think I'll ever buy a car made after the year 2002.
Joseph?
Here in the UK, there are a few models of mobile phone that don't do much but enable you to make calls.
I don't know anyone that owns one.
Most of the people I know that are looking to upgrade their phone in the next couple of months, are after something that does everything - camera, pda, calls, games, etc. No, they don't expect it to be perfect at everything, but it's *one* thing to carry around with them, rather than 4 or 5. If there's a special occasion they know they're going to go to and want decent photos of, they'll take a real camera. If not, and something happens to happen that they feel like taking a quick photo or two of and they're not bothered about the quality - well, their phone goes everywhere with them. Same with the rest of the functions.
Dedicated devices are always going to be superior, but personally, I only have so many pockets...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
People BUY complexity. They could buy a Mac, but they buy the PC because it has 'more software'. They could buy a simple phone, but they buy the one with all the gee-wizz features. They could pay $10 for shareware, but they want Photoshop and Word.
to make this an anti-PC and anti-Microsoft spot..
you do have one good point, though, about buying complexity. I use Word because it is as easy as I want and also as difficult as I want. It's very scalable. Only in the *Nix and shareware/half-ass-ware world would I find a word processor that I could save to a document format that said processor could not, in turn, open.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
I sincerely believe that marketing is ultimately responsible for the frustrations end-users experience. Although I'm sure the Fed guidelines would quibble with me, it seems that marketing is all too full of vague niceties that, to my mind, are simply lies.
Here's one example: Verizon Wireless runs two slogans, "Working Where You Want It To," and "We Never Stop Working For You." And, of course, the ads are full of high platitudes like "America's Number One Network" and "Voted Best For Reliablility."
One of the biggest factors folks weigh when they purchase a cell provider contract is reliability. Verizon's ads can easily lead a reasonable person to conclude that they're network is perfect, or near so.
The reality is, of course, that no cell provider's network is perfect. And, yes, one can find this out by reading the fine print as it blazes across the TV or call VZW to ask. But the ads are ever-prevalent. People rely on them, rightly or wrongly, for real information. Shame on the consumer for not delving into the details, but shame on the marketer for making it difficult for the consumer to discern real information.
There are TONS of examples of this: Wireless products that promise a connect-and-go atmosphere, "Plug-And-Play," "Unlimited" Internet Service, etc.
This marketing is a danger that's been around since advertising, but it seems to me that so much of marketing these days, especially technology marketing, is all about glitz and hooking and less about reality.
m
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Drag the disk to the trash... Stupid. Or use the eject button the keyboard.
Stupid is as stupid does. Both of those are crazy compared to the ease and simplicity of the eject button.
Lose the VCR.
Pay $60 for a LeadTek capture card and capture to the PC. I used a WinTV card from 1996 to record 10s of hours of video when the war first kicked off last year. It managed rather well with VirtualDub which get the peak performance out of it.
Then get a DVD dual format burner ($80 on a good day) and a decent DVD player if you care enough to save the stuff to watch on a real TV.
I have a $50 VCR that's about 6 years old and still works fine. Of course that's not taking into account that I consciously forgot I had it for most of that period. I always had it hooked up to my computer but I use it as a TV-tuner 99.999% of the time. It wasn't until a year or two ago I rediscovered I could tape shows with it.
Now I'm using the LeadTek to move the more important things from tape to digital so I'll probably forget about the record feature on it again.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Correction: You can't even buy a new simple cell phone any more. There are plenty of places to buy simple hardworking solid old reliable boring secondhand mobiles, if that's your thing. (In Australia, any Cash Converters.) Meanwhile, you could do a lot worse than a Series 60 phone -- the basics are easy and the expansion options are infinite.
Manufacturers are expected to show rising sales and profits over time. In consumer electronics prices drop quickly as a matter of course. The only thing manufacturers can do is dream up features and add them so they can justify resetting the price level. In general, consumers do not reject the new top-heavy product. Partly this is because the less feature-burdened product exits the market and partly because this is because consumers buy potential -- applications they might very well never need or want. There's always this little voice that says "you may want to use it that way sometime."
Most people never program their VCRs to time-shift a program. But how many people would buy a VCR that had no timer -- even for a much lower price?
The creeping feature creature will not be conquered until the consumer rebels.
Rube Goldberg
Fuck all jews
Your VCR has an undocumented feature, good taste. Most of what the Sci Fi Channel airs is crap. Your VCR is just trying to prtoect you from it. Tape Monk instead.
Here's a classic example of how the high-tech complexity translates into additional revenue for sleazy corporations:
If you get a cell phone, after awhile you may find that it isn't working as well as it used to. I ran into this problem with my Sprint phone. The phone seemed to be functioning fine, but it would have more trouble finding a signal and would drop calls more often. When I complained to Sprint customer service, they tried to sell me on a new, "better" phone.
I noticed that a cell tower near my house was having maintenance done on it and a temporary tower was set up in its place. I asked if this might have anything to do with my problems, and it was only then, the rep suggested I update the "roam list" on the phone. This was a free, five-minute deal at the Sprint store and as soon as that was done, my phone worked better than ever! I've subsequently found out you can update your roam list on some service providers by pressing a simple *-key sequence on the phone.
I suspect that tens of thousands of people have been hood-winked into buying a new phone when they merely needed to update the phone's firmware or roam list for free.
Ever since shopping for a Tivo, wanting a Replay TV and finally building my own HTPC (Home Theater PC) I'll never record on a VCR again. It is just too darn nice to be able to skip commercials, export shows, and email video clips now. I'm using Snapstream's 'Beyond TV', an out of the box recording solution that works.
If we followed KISS, then our world would not be as complicated as it is, but there would not be progress if new products did not create demand.
My phone
Personally, I thought the idea of a flashlight on a phone was insane, who needs a light on their phone? Different tastes..
Face it -- on the sales floor, the bottom line is commission. You want the consumer to walk out having BOUGHT SOMETHING.
I've known more dishonest salesguys to talk up a particular high-margin unit, even if another (pricier) unit was actually what the buyer wanted, because they get better commission on the one they're steering people to.
So they'll call it an HDTV (it isn't). Or they'll exaggerate how fast that microwave can cook something. Or they'll suggest that "oh this particular model's proven itself very reliable" (it's been on the market for 2 weeks).
And then people get it home and they don't even know what they've bought.
It is truly a wonderful and amazing thing that you can buy a mechanically and electronically sophisticated device like a VCR for 50 bucks (have you looked inside? those things look like they were designed by Rube Goldberg). However, the conversion of the VCR into a disposable item (why fix it, when the whole machine costs less than the time it would take a skilled tech to open it up and look inside?) has had some unfortunate consequences:
1) Technology frozen about 10 years ago. Can you believe that most VCRs still have a memory of maybe 8 events or so? There is no reason why a VCR couldn't come with scheduling software as sophisticated as a TiVo--except that then they'd have to charge more than 50 bucks for the thing.
2) Quality control and design shot to hell. Who complains when it breaks down in a couple of years. I cost almost nothing, anyway? And if you want a decent remote, take the money you saved and spend a few bucks for an add-on.
3) Good ones almost impossible to find. Quality VCRs are still manufactured by hard-core VCR manufacturers like JVC, but good luck finding one of them at Best Buy--you'll need a specialty retailer. And be prepared to pay almost as much, if not more, than you would have paid for less features a decade ago.
Now, the same thing is happening to DVD players. I was scanning Best Buy the other day, and quality players were basically absent. Extra money doesn't buy you better quality--just gimmick features like a turntable or (the latest thing!) a VCR built into the same box. Of course, the good ones can still be found at the high-end audio/video stores, but the price gap is huge (or, more accurately, they haven't dropped much as the bottom end has come down).
Do you have anywhere that i can see these suspension systems on line? I am currently working on a sand rail, and i am relatively unhappy with the standard coil over spring/gas shock solutions, not for any good technical reason, but mostly because i know how to do those, and i am building this to try and do things i have not done before.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
the manufacturers will keep adding features to keep increasing profits. the more confused the consumers are, the better they are off in terms of being able to decrease consumer surplus. willingness to pay on part of consumers is proportional to their understanding of the product and/or a reference price they can set in their heads. consumers should demand simpler products... that's the only way products are going to get simpler and more reliable.
BP http://www.card-central.com
How about: Stop buying their crap?
America is no longer a consumer driver society, but rather an entertainment driven one. If something is entertaining, Americans will buy it - doesn't matter if it's really a piece of junk and doesn't do anything more than the one they bought last week, as long as it has some quality that is entertaining. Manufacturers know this and are simply supplying what the consumers demand. There is no need for quality. There is no need for ethics. As long as you are entertaining it doesn't matter.
My ThinkPad will do ten-hour battery life... ... with the screen off ... :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I've had two work mobiles. The first was an Ericsson (wish I could remember what model), about 8-9 years ago. Small, not tiny, not obviously ruggedised. First day I had it, before I got the leather slipcase, I fumbled and dropped it. As I was walking along. Right onto the tip of my steel-capped boot. Straight off my boot into the brick wall about 6' away. Undamaged, unmarked, survived for another 6 years.
;-)
Figured I'd never find another phone that rugged, but my current Siemens M30 is damned close. Only outward indication of ruggedness is the rubberised battery cover - the rest is normal plastic. But it regularly falls off the belt-clip as I get out of the van (my fault; it's a combination of where I wear it and the seat belt buckle pushing the release button) and drops from above waist height onto concrete/bitumen. No problems yet.
(OK, one minor problem. A couple of buttons are starting to wear the clearcoat off, because of my habit of storing it down the side of my laptop case at night...)
Note that neither of these phones were available in fluorescent colours (OK, so the Siemens comes in yellow or gray...) or compatible with Hello Kitty clip-on skins, which may be a problem for some
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
I've been reading halfway through the comments (what, you expect me to read the article?) and it suddenly grabbed me that a lot of people were complaining about features.
And some other people pointed out that people ask for features.
Yet at the same time we want things to be simple.
Well, I like lots and lots of features, but I want them to be simple. That's why I for instance Love Photoshop and won't use Gimp. Photoshop has more features though...
OK, I'm moving away from computer programs to avoid religious discussions...
My wife and I both have the cheapest, simplest phones around. They share the same feature set (games, diddly tunes, whatever), but mine has a Nokia-like interface, hers a weird one. Mine is simple, hers is complex.
Same features, same product, mine simple, hers complex. She uses hers every day, but still can do some things better on my phone, while they are quite different in approach.
It's not the amount of features, it's the DESIGN. That's what KISS means. There are more than enough one function devices around that are really really complex, bad or plain stupid (simple stupid: good. plain stupid: bad).
That's btw the difference between a good gui and a dumb-it-down pretty pictures approach.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I think the KISS principle was lost at ATI about the time they claimed to have hired good driver writers. I hope someday that they understand that cratuniting the zeerbutzan should not only do what it says without further config needs anywhere but is not a cute marketing label. S/PDIF is S/PDIF... pass-through AC3 and DTS is pass-through AC3 and DTS. How hard can it be to just provide a truthful interface? None of this "Yes, you can play DVD's and pass the Audio on to your video card, pass it out to a receiver, or we will decode it for you... Then you find out that this is only the case in very specific and non-intuitive situations and settings where you clearly have been misled either through malice or incompetence.
They can have my Motorola StarTAC when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
"If it has screws, it was meant to be taken apart."
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein
more features, less concise user manuals, and poor marketing, which ends up increasing costs and frustrating users
This is what happens when a PHB decides he's going to take charge and outsource everything to India!
I mean, I didnt see anything about Gene Simmons, man, I mean, thats, like bogus fraudulence, or something, man..
And anyway, I want my cell phone to play games, IM, email, cameras, HDTV, etc. And The market seems to think I'm in the majority, so to hell with the Ludite losers out there.
I've found that most of the people who have trouble with technology don't have the problem because they aren't intelligent in general, they just don't care enough to learn how it works.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So some people can't figure out how to use the things they buy. Too bad. I say add more features. Many features require little in the way of additional hardware. Why not include them even if they're not used often? Granted, sometimes there are bad interfaces but a bad interface is better than NO interface!
It's sad. Look at what happened to digital watches. They're much more reliable than analog watches and they died only because people couldn't figure out how to set them to the correct time.
On a similar note, I'm beginning to hate PowerPoint. Why does everything have to be broken into bite size pieces? Give me high density information. I'm a big boy. I can read a white paper.
Offtopic, but ironically that's the group that evolution rewards...nature's handouts.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Don't buy the crap!
With further analysis of this statement there is a key point...manufacturers. Manufacturing is the implementation of a design pruducing a saleable product. In some of these industries who is doing R&D, marketing research, usability/ergonomic studies anymore?
Some of the blunders are so stupid. Cell phones alone are an anti-pattern ripe for analysis. Is ONE company goes out and offers a simple phone, a simple calling plan, and no bullsh!t they will have my business...but they won't have teh business of some teenager that pays 2 bucks to every couple of days to change their background screen or ringer tone.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
When my cell phone plan came up for renewal a few months ago, I intentionally bypassed all of the color, camera, extraneously feature-rich models for one of the few remaining black-and-white models, an LG VX10, for just the reasons suggested: I want a phone, period.
But even this simple model comes with feature overkill: try as you may, you can't make it silent. Even with every single sound option disabled or set to buzz, it still plays a silly tune during shutdown, precisely when I've discovered I've entered a quiet zone like a theatre and want to turn it off!
Guilty disclaimer: But I'd pay money for a ring tone of Elmer Fudd saying "Wiiiing!", as in "Yes opawaitah, it went Wiiiing!"
Phones seem to have gotten more complex; perhaps there is hope they emerge as the dominant pocket appliance - it seems sure something will emerge as such, at least to me. I don't want to have to worry about carrying more than one device and yes it would be nice if it had a flashlight and also unlocked my car and started it too.
So, whoever said it is right, phones are getting more complex. This is probably ok if you really think about it.
CD players aren't really, and the same goes for VCRs and DVD players. They can all now be had very very cheaply in their most simple form. This is, I think, a good thing. One might argue, they've been around longer as consumer appliances and they've figured KISS out.
But, I'm not seeing a whole lot of KISS in the software world. Especially in the Windows world.
With the exception of most decent and I mean really decent *nix software, most software seems to have gone on a sugar and steroid fad diet for nearly the past few decade.
Ever see MSDOS 2.2 run on a multi gighertz modern machine? Try it. It's scary fast. What happened?
Ten years ago I used to setup internet stuff in people houses for a local ISP. It was a good way to make $100/hr as it really didn't take more than 45 minutes anyway. I carried around Netscape on one flopy, Eudora, Trumpet Winsock, ftp, telnet and talk on the other floppy.
Quark was 3 megs. Then it was 7 megs. Now it's 300. Is it 100x better? Fuck no, it's not even as good.
Fit enough for an internet setup on a floppy? I'm not sure you could get it to fit on one CD these days.
If any of you out there actually write this stuff: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? HAVE YOU NO PRIDE?
"Hello World!" Shouldn't be 7 frikkin megs because you're pulling in God knows what class libraries, this can be 42 byte program if you really try.
I swear Windows apps had to go through 3 or 4 generations of hardware upgrades just to get back to as fast as they were before they all went "true 32 bit" and I cringe at the prospect of 64 and maybe even 128 bit apps.
One of the computers I use is a W98 system on fairly contemporary hardware. I still use 3 or 4 16-bit Windows programs I've been carrying with me for over a decade now. They're small, fast do what I want and nothing more.
And all 3 fit on one floppy with room to spare.
I dunno about thit object oriented class library stuff, I really don't know. I wish more people would learn assembler below the C level than keep wanting to go above it with "easier" and "more powerful" languages; I think it's ill advised.
Short term pain for long term gain: you should probably suffer writing software so I don't have to when using it.
Need Mercedes parts ?
One problem with the HDTV scam is the native resolution of devices offered. I've seen projectors with 800x600 claiming to be "HD Ready" because they can downsample a 1080i image. I'm sorry, but if it ain't 1920x1080 PIXELS, it's not
a true 1080i image. VERY few TV's (CRT, Plasma, LCOS, DLP) support true HD. Some really have 1280x720, A.K.A 720p, which does kick ass, and is fine for many applications.
However, to talk about an 868x480 plasma as "HD-READY" is FRAUD. I'm puzzled that lawyers haven't seen this as a false-advertising class-action suit ready to happen.
If you're buying a TV, demand to know the NATIVE resolution supported.
It can be done, but it's not easy. When my trusty Nokia died, I went to the nearest AT&T Wireless store to replace it. I handed the first salescretin my phone and said "I want one just like it, please." They must have offered me seven high-end phones with color and camera, then another five low-end phones with crappy batteries and non-existent antennae (also the nasty low-end Nokia UI, much worse than the high-end).
Finally, they gave up and flagged down the senior salescretin who had been hiding in the back. He took one look at my dead phone and sold me the updated version for $150. It's slightly larger and has a blue screen instead of a green one. The end.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Companies have been making perfect electronics for at least 80 years. In fact, most of them are still around because they have a great product and a loyal following. The blame for making new crappy models with way too many features and limited shelf life should be placed squarely on consumers. Stop buying so much crap!
People don't seem to realize that all the inventions we like to have around were perfected years ago. Take some examples (approximations):
Telephone - 1950 Bell telephone
Microwave - 1970
Stereo - 1957 Quad, 1980 Linn LP12
Camera - 1940 Leica M
TV - 1980 Sony Trinitron
Car - 1990 Honda Accord
Computer - 2000 Apple G4
Some of these are even being generous. Sure, we can do things a little quicker with newer gadgets but the pure user experience and lasting quality reached a peak a long time ago for most things. Product usability has been going steadily downward since the 60s with a huge crash in the late 90s.
So cell phone companies don't get with the times and compete with themselves to provide a cheap fixed rate each month for unlimited local and long distance calls (receving and sending).
Most contractors, plumbers, maintenance men, and property managers I've met used Nextel phones. When you can buy Nextel accessories from Maintenance Warehouse, that speaks to their popularity in that field (whether they deserve it or not). The commercial Nextel phones are not as obviously flimsy as the "caliber" of phones on display in a Cingular store. Supposedly you can download and run Java applets on your phone, but the one I've been issued doesn't have that feature on the plan. Maybe someone can elaborate.
But when the plumbers drop their phone into the toilet, full bathtub, or pit of water coming up from the ground, it still kills the Nextel phone, even after trying to dry them out. But mine's taken a lot of abuse, and the screen, the keys, the antanae, the battery, they all stil work as well as when I recieved it. And that's better than most Nokias I've used.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
That number is probably due to all the dumbies buying those $2000 plasma screens from Gateway.
Yup, new policy where I work is simple: no cell-phones of any kind. If you get caught (read: forget), and your phone has a camera, M-16s and barking dogs will accompany you to jail.
"WE WANT NIPPLES!"
The right one makes the seat go up. The left one makes the seat go down. Pull both out to reset.
Haven't had one of those in awhile.....
Sorry, a bit too much Perl Golf, but can't you replace "mov ax, 4C00; int 21" with "int 20" and shave another three bytes off? I don't have DOS available to test it right now, but that should work if I remember correctly (assuming you don't care about the exit code)
Trust me on this, it now explains what to do, how to do it and it's nice and simple... compared to a user manual for my printer from 10 years ago, it's more concise, perhaps less comprehensive, where's the list of printer controll codes, status messages, and a annotated disassembly of the unit?
Nokia 2100 for example, is a pretty basic phone. The only real 'feature' it has is SMS chat. No games, no polyphone ringtones, etc. And I bet there are other phones like this.
Here's the secret to immortality:
It's not new, pointless, features that bother me, it's when they drop old useful features in the pursuit of bells and whistles.
My Sharp GX10 *mobile* phone appeared to be great, and I was lucky enough to play with a pre-release version which persuaded me to purchase one. But then I found out some of the obvious things they have forgotten:
* If you try to type in a number whilst in a call, when you hang up, you lose the number!
* You cannot send contact details to other phones via SMS.
* No PC connectivity. You can store around 100 photos, but to get them off the phone, you have to use MMS. It would take a whole day and around 20 UK pounds to remove all the photos!
Just my 2 pennies worth...
I've long ranted about the poor usability of consumer electronics. In particular, many of the problems here aren't that the advanced features are present, but rather that the sorry interface designers have tried to put them all front-and-center and cluttered up the entire interface, even the simple, basic stuff that everyone wants to do. Taking their camera example, of course it's ludicrous to suggest that the camera shouldn't be able to adjust shutter speed or f-stop. However, the casual user who just wants to point and click need never know those features exist, and certainly they shouldn't get in his/her way from just using the camera. Certainly cellphones are very guilty in this regard.
-if that was true, people wouldn't buy phones with cameras, PIMs, and God knows what. The market has decided what they want (tons of crap) and the manufacturers are giving it to them. If they didn't make money off of these models, we wouldn't see anymore of them.
In short: get the customers' heads into the real world.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
Lawsuits. Lots and lots of lawsuits.
Hey, it's the American way.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I have a (now) old-fashioned Motorola i95cl for Nextel. I like having the flip b/c in the closed position, the screen and keypad are protected and still look new unlike any non-flip I've ever seen. Also I can unholster it and open it with one hand by pushing a finger or two between the two halves -- it just snaps open. Also, being a Nextel, I can just push one button on the outside to answer it as a speakerphone without opening it -- which is great when I'm driving. Reach down, push one button and get right back to two-handed driving while talking on the speakerphone. Its illegal to hold a phone while driving in NJ and NY now, so its easy to comply.
Its really not that bad.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Salesmen should be put to the test and fined when when they start yammering about misleading Information. They should be licenced and have it revoked when they push products based on unfactual information.
I was looking for a Fiber to connect my Dvd player to my Reciver (my SPDIF was allready used or else I wouldn't have bothered going fiber cause its got no real reason to use fiber). I asked the sales guy where the Fibers were that weren't gold plated... He told me they don't stock them cause your allready spending a good chunk of money why not get the best?... What the hell does gold plating do for light transmission... not to mention we tested a bunch of gold plated cables at work one day and they all preformed worse then thier ungoldplated counterparts for similar money.. They were more susceptable to noise interferance among other things....
Basically the non tech savvy are at the mercy of salesmen that don't have the slightest clue about the technology they are selling and only care about selling products that have the highest profit margin/comission. It usually never has to do with meeting customer needs.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Ohthankgod, I had thought aliens had secretly killed everybody else that knew machine language.
Also encouraging is things like Operas archive where you can still get an award winningly small (gads, only 3.4M) browser.
So I dunno if I share the doom and gloom of the article. To some extent eveythings eventually ends up in it's simplest and most efficient form because we aren't the only ones here that want KISS.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Your job sucks. Start looking for a new one, preferably not in China.
Wordperfect 5.1 didn't have a grammar checker built into it; Grammatik (by another company) was an add-on product.
MS logic: If people are paying extra for Grammatik, there must be a market. Lets give it away for free, increase Word dominance, kill Grammatik's market, and not give consumers any more reasons to stick with WP51 (except, of course, that it was WAY faster than Word, had legal/government document templates available for it, and the files were a hell of a lot smaller)
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
NOT! I just wanted to take this opportunity to say fuck you to all you assholes with cell phones. There is no more sickening invention on the face of this earth. Especially, to you stupid bitches in my college who have begun dialing before you even walk out the class room door -- and never walk the 2 minutes between classrooms without making at least 1 call -- I hope you walk in front of a semi, and DIE
>>most people want cell phones that do one thing - make calls.
;-)
>>Yet phones come with games, instant messaging, cameras, etc.
Sounds like Emacs.
My buddy tells me he thinks the best user interface company is...Fischer-Price. Think about it--they literally make UIs that even a two-year old can figure out.
I did a bit of HCI (Human-Computer Interface) studying in college, and one approach always appealed to me. It's the tiered approach. Here's how it works.
You're designing the UI for a widget. Find out how the simplest users are going to use the thing. Those functions get special buttons, the easiest navigation, big and prominent. Then you figure out how intermediate users are going to use the product. Those functions are given one-touch buttons and placed off to the side in the hunt'n'peck section (include your own "huntin' pecker" joke here).
Then there's the geeks. These features you can bury deep in menus that require special codes to get to them ("press slash, dot, enter the feature code, and you'll be transported to a menu..."). This always seems to make people happy. Look at the TiVo remote. Like the guy in the article said, he uses pause the most. The biggest button on TiVo? Pause. Big, yellow, right in the center.
Then there's products where you don't have any single group of "simplest" users. Some of these people are buying it to do X, and some Y. In that case, you ask them up front what type of user they are and...whatever functions they're going to use the most get the most prominent places. This strategy is not always possible, but I've yet to see it fail where it has been applicable.
sevbut have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Stop buying the shit.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Heheh, it's so simple, you had to make it complicated.
To turn off the iPod, put it down and walk away.
It'll turn itself off after a short delay. The power button 'feature' is only there because geeks insisted they should be able to turn it 'off'.
And again with the power:
How do I plug it into the wall?
You don't. You plug it into your computer, and it charges itself while it syncs with your playlists.
If you do have to plug it in to the wall, you connect the power supply to the cable that fits the device, just like every other of a thousand varriations of the DC power jack. And you don't have to think very hard about picking between the big hole and the small hole.
n/t no text
Wow. I hope all the lines at the beginning of the message about the empty parking lots at Fry's were irony.
You're right about Fry's branching into retail electronics from groceries. My point is that the modern electronics business is different enough from groceries so that it would be in their best interest not to run their computer store exactly like a grocerie store.
Fry's electronics is fantastic and fantasticly frustrating at the same time. One opened ten miles away about five years ago in the shell of a giant Radio Shack that went bust. I enjoy going there, but I don't buy as much stuff there as I used to.
Fry's is at their peak now and stuck. They can't grow and their 'grocery store' formula is too successful to fail. My suggestions are methods that they could use to get out of their present dilemma and onto the next level of success.