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."

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.