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Consumers Look For More Utilitarian Cellphones
hdtv writes "The Associated Press has an article about new generation of US consumers, who shun the mobile devices packed with features in favor of simpler devices that get the job done. One would think that as cell phones evolve into cameras, e-mail readers, Web browser and music players, mobile users would be happy with the device that fulfills their digital needs, but according to AP, 'a J.D. Power & Associates survey last year found consumer satisfaction with their mobile devices has declined since 2003, with some of the largest drops linked to user interface for Internet and e-mail services.'"
What always annoyed me about the advances in mobile phone technology is that they never really improved reception. They add feature after feature. You can take and send photos. You can browse the internet, but you always manage to lose signal in the worst possible places. I used to live in a large metropolitan area and would regularly lose signal. I lived *inside* Chicago and I could barely get a signal in my own damn apartment. Is it because of the buildings? Maybe it'll never work right.
I say screw all the stupid features. Just give me a phone that just works everywhere. I couldn't care less if it can take pictures, browse the web, or download movie trailers.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I call bullshit. I'm not sure what "definition" you're using, but a given interface does not have to become more complex as functions get added. As a matter of face, added features can simplify a given interface. I can't think of something specific atm, but I'm sure you can find an example or two in Cupertino somewhere.
I think the problem lies in the business model of the service providers rather than general ineptitude on the part of phone makers. I for one would be perfectly happy with a phone with a billion unnecessary gizmos, doodad, and whatnots, as long as there's a way to get them out of sight the minute they become intrusive. However, I think a lot of the clutter of most mobile phones comes from the exorbitant pay-out-the-ass-for-data plans that service providers are making a killing on. I doubt it would be difficult to design a phone interface that provides a "simple" mode that hides all unnecessary or obtrusive functions out of sight. But ask yourself the question, would it be as profitable?
I only mod funny =D
I love phones packed with as many features as can be packed. I've gotten a series of ever more complex cell phones and I've enjoyed each one more and more.
But guess what, you're right.
I'm not like everyone else. I've realized for a long time that the compromizes I'm willing to make for the features I want are not compromizes very many of my friends or family would be willing to make. I've gottent to the point that I won't even recommend a phone that I personally love if I think that the phone will be too frustrating to the person asking for the recommendation.
So here's the deal. Why can't you have your simple phone AND I have my complex phone? Is there any reason why one of these should be "better" as opposed to "better for you" or "better for me"? I applaud people making their oppinions known to cell phone providers and manufacturers so more simple phones will be offered. All I ask it that you don't tell them to stop offering phones with the great features I want. Really, we can coexist in peace.
TW
It is a rip off here in the US, yes. Unbelievable.
In Europe, you can get decent deals, however. Your prepaid service has a good shelf life, unlike here where you simply MUST buy more minutes every month or they cut you off. You don't get charged for receiving calls (caller pays) and in fact with the service I had you actually got a (very) small kickback when someone called you. The prices were reasonable, and I would prepay roughly $60 and not need to worry about it again for 6 months.
When I came back to the US, I went to try and get service and it was an absolute nightmare. They don't want to just sell you bloody phone service, they want to give you a 'free' (read paid for by you, in the fine print, of course) phone that was loaded with all this crap I don't care about, making it far more complex than it needs to be, they want you to pay at least $60-75 every month, and they're very pushy about it. Even after politing refusing this over and over again and finally getting the simple phone service that I wanted, it's $20 a pop, there are connection fees and charges for receiving calls and every sneaky hidden gotcha in the book. That $20 lasts me barely a week, so when all the crap is added up it turns out to be TWELVE times as expensive as the service I was used to. And on top of that, of course, coverage SUCKS. And when I'm in an area with no coverage at all for a few weeks, I come back, and find that my prepaid phone, with a positive balance, has been turned off - apparently because one is required to add money every month whether you're using it or not, or else you lose it.
This was with T-Mobile, who were reputed to have by far the best coverage in the area I was in, by the way. If the others are worse, I don't understand how they stay in business at all.
So I've just packed my phone away. The cellular companies in this company, apparently, aren't interested in offering simple telephone service at a reasonable price. Until they are, I am not interested in them.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Amen to all that - I have an Orange (UK) SmartPhone running Micro$oft's OS and some of the most fundamental tasks require so many menu clicks it's unbelievable:
Set the alarm: Start, 4 (settings), 9 (more), 3 (Date and Time), 4 x Scroll, Enter.
Compare this to my previous phone: 'Settings' button, Date and Time, Enter.
My old phone was also sensible enough to allow opt-out days on alarms so you could have a recurrent wake up for work days that didn't operate at weekends - now I get hit with a 6.30 alarm on Saturday and Sunday unless I remember to turn it off - and then I have to remember to turn it on again on Sunday night or be late for work!
On one occasion I used my old phone to record someone threatening me in the street (I didn't need to use it as the incident calmed down) all I had to do was covertly hold down one button. This is impossible on the new phone as you have to look at and navigate the menus:
Start...9 (More)...5 (Voice notes)...Record
Mind you, my new phone could have also recorded video of the incident:
Click camera button...Menu...Capture mode....2 (Video)...Capture
Not exactly subtle and the act of me staring and operating my phone during such a tese moment would probably have got me clobbered! In any case, the last time I tried to record some video for fun, the phone refused ('Insufficient memory') and I had to reboot it to free some RAM for the OS. Picture the scene..
Click...click...click...click...[Error]...Oh, wait Mr Thug, I need to reboot my phone, can you hang on for about 2 minutes and bear with me as I may need to take out the battery if the reboot hangs.
There was some speculation that Nokia are (or were considering) relaunching one of their more basic models (the 6310i) due to popular demand.
AT&ROFLMAO
I share a family plan with my brother and mother. The base price is $60 for two lines, costing an additional $8 per additional line. This includes unlimited nights and weekends (which I believe start at 8 or 9 at night), and 1000 "anytime" minutes shared between the three of us. This also includes unlimited calling to T-mobile customers. My mother uses her phone mainly to speak with the two of us, so most of the anytime minutes are split between myself and my brother. This is plenty of anytime minutes and we have never gone over (if it happened, we would upgrade our plan). We also pay $10 a month for unlimited text and picture messaging on all three lines to or from anyone. The $10 price can be used for up to five lines (great deal, it used to cost $10 for 1000 messages on one line.). With the amount of text messaging my brother and I do, this is a fantastic deal (I had months when I used to go over my previous allotment of 1000 messages by quite alot). For my own line, I also pay $6 a month for unlimited data. This allows me to use Opera and Google Local (as well as any other data apps I would like) as often as I want. With the Opera browser, this allows me to basically do anything I would like online from my cell phone while Google Local integrates great with my service and has saved my ass more than once. I love Opera's customizable homepage too, for quick access to the sites and services I tend to visit and use from my cell phone. Outside of taxes, which amount to $1.23 per line and a per-account charge of $7.64, the only other charges are insurance charges ($6 for the only insured phone, through a 3rd party) or one-time fee charges (think 411, downloadable media, etc). Of course, with the unlimited data package, 411 is unnecessary, while the un-crippled state of my phone makes the included USB cord a much more attractive option for downloadable programs and content.
I know I've gone off on quite a tangent, but my point is that some of the optional features are VERY affordable and can be quite useful. Some fairly simple hacking allows me to customize my phone to quite an impressive extent, effectively hiding any features I personally don't use. For instance, voice recording and some very technical settings (the ones that only change when you change providers) don't even show up in my menu system while Opera and Google Local (of which I use one at least daily) are bound to a single click of one of the keypad keys.
It's interesting to note that a friend with the same phone that I own, but with Verizon service instead, had quite a different experience. The most revealing comparison was the fact that pressing the menu key on my phone would take less than a second to bring the menu up, while taking somewhere around 5 seconds to react on hers. This is not a fluke either, as I tested it on another example of the same phone with Verizon service and got the exact same results. I offered to "hack" her phone in an attempt to make it more useable and realized, one hour in, that Verizon crippled the phone to such an extent that it took about 6 hours to upgrade the firmware and settings and still have a fully-functional phone. This, as opposed to the 5 or 10 minute process with T-mobile service, involved an insane combination of flashing the phone with an Alltel package before doing a lengthy series of hex and seem edits. Any other method and the phone would become a paperweight. Verizon doesn't use sim cards either, so her phone isn't useable with other providers or with temporary sim cards in foreign countries. T-mobile not only uses sim cards, but will gladly unlock your phone for you after a couple months of service, allowing use with any other sim card (Whether it's your friend whose phone died or you buying a $20 sim card while abroad instead of paying $.75 or more a minute with your existing service).
Sorry for the Verizon rant in this discussion, but the last 3 years with T-mobile have been amazing compared to the 3.5 years prior to that with Verizon, who did their best to lie and cheat thei
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
I live in Pakistan and celular access is really cheap here. All carriers offer free incoming calls and free incoming SMS. A couple also offer small kickbacks on recieved calls.
What really rocks though is that you can buy a cheap Nokia phone for less than US$100 up-front, stick a pre-paid card into it (about US$ 2) which has about 60 minutes of airtime in it and when that runs out, your incoming calls/sms keep coming in for another FIVE years (Telenor Pakistan). The most ripoff carrier (Mobilink) here still gives you about six months of free incoming before you need to recharge your phone.
On my pre-paid connection, for about US $4.00 I get about 40 mins outgoing calls to other networks, twice that for my own network. The call rates are also flat across the country so it doesnt matter where I am, the same rates apply. I know the US is a heck of a lot larger, geographically, but in this day and age with the level of connectivity the US has, it should not be such a big issue - the internet does it already! Oh and this US$4.00 lasts about 25 mins if I call the US from my cell phone in Pakistan.
My parents recently went to India for a family visit and told me that its even cheaper there.
BTW, the world's largest WiMax deployment has been signed off on between Motorola and Wateen telecom in Pakistan - we should be getting WiMax across the country soon too!
All thanks to competition, deregulation and some solid support from the Musharraf government.
Look at phone interfaces - they're definitely more complex. Just count the number of keypresses (or screens to progress through) to accomplish basic tasks - it's increasing all the time. But that's not real complexity: if you ignore irrelevant menu items then the interfaces aren't really more complex, just more clicky.
But I don't really mind that, because most of the phone interfaces have some sort of "favorites" list to get more quickly to common tasks.
What I do mind is that phone interfaces are becoming steadily less reliable. Interface crashes, slowdowns, sudden poweroffs - they're all now daily occurences, and it drives me nuts.
The obvious answer would be to buy a phone without all the glitzy features, and when I asked for one I was offered a Nokia model for "businessmen who just want a great phone without the gizmos". Uhuh. No camera, no music player...great. But also no Bluetooth. A business phone that I can't interface my PDA and laptop with for dialup? Give me a break - they obviously didn't want anyone to buy it.
No, I'm stuck with an endless succession of phones with more features than I want, shitty interfaces and steadily degrading reliability.
Unfortunately, this is not true. Particularly for the larger manufacturers (such as Nokia and Motorola). They employ large groups of human computer interaction experts that study, design, and test these interfaces. Its incredibly sophisticated in reality.
The problem here is two-fold. The biggest is the overall immaturity of the technology. Symbian has been around for quite awhile, but its base technology is incredibly poor. They've been very slow to embrace modern programming techniques, and the overall quality of their product is quite low. As a result, third party applications end up full of weird little work-arounds that further compromise their stability. This is made worse by requirements (by the symbian signing process) to work in low disk/low memory conditions properly which often destabilizes the OS even further, requiring even more cunning workarounds which inevitably lead to issues under non-standard use cases.
The linux situation is just as bad right now. Motorola is currently using a hacked up version of QTopia at the interface level. Other manufacturers have taken Linux and run with it in their own direction (its not terribly clear what Nokia is planning with Maemo for example). Again, in many cases we have single purpose architecture (the controls and libraries are tested and verified against only a small set of use cases) which leads to more and more issues as these components interact in new ways.
The other big issue is the way phones are currently developed. Nokia (for example) is fragmented into several different 'phone groups', and each group is capable of making arbitrary changes to the base OS. The truly bad UI decisions are made at this level as they face pressure from timelines and mechanical issues. The original UI vision is often compromised for the sake of getting product out the door.
There is a bit of hope, however. Symbian recently released 9.1, and while manufacturers are quite late getting devices out (both Nokia and Sony Ericcson have announced devices at this point) all signs point to an improved experience with this new OS. I expect some more problems for the next 12-18 months as the new Kernel and security model are actually released to users. However, my experiences with this newer technology has been more positive than previous versions. I do question many of their decisions and frusturating problems remain. For example: they do use C++ exceptions now, just wrapped up in their own leave/trap mechanism which means throwing an arbitrary exception object actually brings the whole application down. However, the problems have largely been pushed up a level (the biggest issues seem to be in the UI layers at this point). At the same time, Trolltech seems to be close to bringing out QTopia 4.x which promises to be much more 'turn-key' for OEM's. Hopefully this will eliminate a lot of the Linux fragmentation and create some stability there.
At the same time, most OEM's have recognized the UI issues are going to a MUCH more 'platform-centric' approach in which phone groups must work within the bounds of the overall platform when customizing the OS for a specific phone. I think this will help greatly for future products and should help them to start getting their arms around the complexity of these new devices. I really do think consumers want higher end features, they just want it done in a more coherent (and less bulky) way.
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