How Not to Build a Cellphone

Jamie found an NYT story about a new t-mobile Shadow phone which starts off by talking about how Apple is changing the phone game by wrestling power from the carriers, and then discussing what could be a reasonable piece of hardware. And then how it is wrecked by software. The phone has wait screens, a task manager, odd error messages etc. Makes for an amusing read.

Comments

In the same vein

[mike260]

Joel Spolsky does an entertaining job of ripping another phone with poorly-designed software to pieces here.

Mystifying

[StarKruzr]

I'm still waiting for the phone that sounds and works like a phone.

Why does everyone say this as if it doesn't exist?

I suspect it is because they want their posts to sound as though they possess some real down-home 'Murrican wisdom. Jesus. How many counterexamples do I have to find? All of these are "phones that look and act like phones."

Moreover, why is ANYONE "against" convergence? Seriously? Do you really WANT to be carrying around a camera, a phone, a PDA, and a laptop?

Wrong! That's not an advantage, that's insane. At least, I can't remember the last time I was looking at my cellphone thinking, "Damn, I wish right now I could open up a Word document!", not even if one was attached to an e-mail.

Yesterday, when I got an email from my advisor. Thankfully, I had my iPhone at the ready and it was quite capable of opening the document. I was able to answer her question immediately and it made me look like I was really on top of things. I guess that makes me "insane."

"wresting power from the carriers"?

[Thaelon]

I fail to see how "wresting power from the carriers" is a bad thing. They do evil things with it. Two year contracts with "early termination fees". Phones locked into their service. Phones with software or hardware they've deliberately crippled (Verizon I'm looking at you). Phones that have had a nice GUI replaced with their branded crap. Charging absurd prices for downloads. Padding HTTP headers with data so you use more of their outrageously overpriced data plans. I could go on and on. But if you ask me, the more power the phones wrest from the carriers, the better off we'll be.

Re:No Design Experience

[phoenix_rizzen]

My original cell phone, a Panasonic TX-220, had a single-keypress lock function. However, it required holding down the lock key for 2 seconds to enable or disable (with an auto-enable after 10 seconds feature). Never had it accidentally lock or unlock on me, and I found it to be a lot more usable than the "top-left button, then bottom-left button" process to un/lock my current phone.

Don't dismiss a single-key lock process because you can't think of a way to make it work. :) It's been done before, it's been done well, and lots of us really miss it.

Re:Cell phones are pieces of shit.

[zlogic]

I hesitate to suggest this since they seem incapable of getting even simple things right, but replace SIM cards with SD cards (they're effectively a commodity now, $20 for 2GB). Poof, instant long-play pocket audio recorder! SIM cards are more than simply memory. They store a bunch of encryption keys; but the keys are NOT transferred into the phone and a lot of encryption is done on the SIM card, so technically it's a very simple processor. It's done so that someone doesn't steal your phone, clone the SIM card, assign any PIN they like and get "free" calls as well as a "free" phone.
Oh, and most modern phones (except really cheap ones) have an SD, miniSD or microSD slot.

The ability to turn the volume up or down in a wider scale than they give us. Most phones have a speakerphone mode that makes it really loud; turn it on but turn down the volume, this way it'll be louder than normal but not deafening.

The phone to tell me what the hell it's doing signal-wise. It may be anything, including the carrier. For example here in Russia most prepaid contracts (having a $5-$10 monthly ARPU) have a much lower priority and their calls are dropped or rejected if network load exceeding limits; they are also switched into half-duplex mode when bandwidth is needed for something more important. I think that "bars" are lowered if the signal is too noisy.

A phone that doesn't fucking break. My Siemens phone got chewed by a dog, its screen (the protective glass, not the display itself) now has a hole in it (because of the dog), the battery is dead because of awful handling (but still lasts a day or two), I opened it twice just to look inside and it was dropped a million times. Everything (except the battery) works perfectly! My new phone is a Sony Ericsson and I've never had any problems with it yet.