Mobile Phone Users Struggle With Hardware Adoption

Ian Lamont writes "A Google executive speaking at the Emerging Technology conference has described a problem that mobile phone carriers and manufacturers have been struggling with over the last few years: Users aren't taking advantage of many phones' hardware-based features. Rich Miner, Google's group manager of mobile platforms, stated that 80% of mobile phones being sold today have cameras on them, yet the number of people who actually know how to use them or get the images off the phones ranges between 10% and 50%, depending on the model. Miner listed several reasons for this state of affairs, including bad UIs and small screens, but added that the participation of companies with software expertise — including Google — would help increase usage of such features."

Comments

Re:Cell phone companies to blame?

[fiannaFailMan]

My guess is that this article is just flat-out wrong. I know when I plug my iPhone into my Mac ...

My guess is that he wasn't talking about iPhones. I use a Samsung..... something or other and I've yet to figure out how to get photos off the damn thing or how to lose that annoying 'ringback tone' that I had no idea what it was when I got it and now people don't like when they call me. Nor can I manage my image folders, there's no way to rename them or add new folders. And there's no quick way to delete the dozens of black pictures that it keeps taking on the inside of my pocket.

And when I go through the laboriously slow process of reading email on the damn thing, it won't let me see pdf or doc attachments. Bottom line: I hate the damn thing and I'm getting an iPhone.