This is what I think of new generation mobile phones that can sing like a choir, check my email, play MP3s – and get your your photograph taken at the end of the day. They’re cool, and you’ll be the envy of your friends … until the next person gets an even more feature-packed phone.
But frankly I’d prefer a phone that doesn’t crash every time I try to access my Inbox. A phone which can intelligently organise my list of numbers so I can view my contacts in any way I want (for instance, call: Family Members > Dad. Or SMS: Friends > Bristol gang).
And a phone which remembers my personal settings and knows which words in its vocabulary I usually prefer to SMS with (for instance, I type ‘mum’ much more often than ‘nun’, but it’s still the default when I use predictive text input).
But many phone manufacturers don’t give a hoot about these ‘little things’ because it sounds so much nicer to say “We’ve put in polyphonic ringtones, colour screens, and a microwave to boot” rather than “We’ve improved our Calendar feature so the user only has to click once to access his schedule for the week. We’ve also gotten rid of that irritating bug which everyone’s been complaining about. And overall, we’ve made things easier for everybody by getting rid of features which most people don’t use, and charging them a lower price for this scaled-down model.”
Frankly, I think WAP is dead, and 3G will follow in its footsteps until access to hi-speed networks becomes more affordable for the common user. The culture of using your mobile phone to access the Internet, hasn’t been developed to its full potential, either – save for places like Japan where the average worker spends an hour or more sitting in a train to get to work, and is able to afford the phone and network rates.