CoffeeBear.net

Cellphones suck!

Posted by Mark | Filed under Rants

I con­fess. I’m a technophile. I like read­ing about new tech­nolo­gies and gad­gets. Even bet­ter, I like own­ing new tech­nolo­gies and gad­gets. And yet, I don’t have a cell­phone of my own. I bought one for my wife but that was only because she was doing a lot of dri­ving out into the boonies of Iowa as part of her degree pro­gram. The phone is a cou­ple of years old now but I’m in no hurry to replace it. I’m in even less of a hurry to get one for myself.

Why? Because every cell­phone I see out there sucks. The cell­phone man­u­fac­tur­ers are rush­ing to build in all sorts of extra­ne­ous func­tion­al­ity. This adds to the phone’s weight, size & com­plex­ity with­out pro­vid­ing any mean­ing­ful benefit.

Let’s look at a sim­i­lar prod­uct for a moment, the iPod. In a field of hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of MP3 play­ers the iPod is the indus­try leader and it has the least func­tion­al­ity of the lot. While the other man­u­fac­tur­ers have added FM tuners and recorders and god-only-knows what else; Apple has kept the iPod sim­ple and it’s mak­ing them money hand over fist.

But what does the iPod have to do with cell­phones? Besides that hideous ROKR thing? That’s sim­ple, lit­er­ally. By restrict­ing the func­tion­al­ity of the device to the bare min­i­mum, Apple gave con­sumers exactly what they wanted. While cell­phone man­u­fac­tur­ers keep throw­ing func­tion after func­tion into their phones in hopes that more peo­ple will plunk down $500 for their lat­est toy.

All those func­tions sound great, but really how many peo­ple actu­ally use all of them? I can­not speak for every­body, but I would greatly appre­ci­ate a cell­phone that sim­ply promises:

• Supe­rior bat­tery life
• Excel­lent Reception
• Eas­ily fits in my pocket

How­ever from all the adverts I see for cell­phones; I have a feel­ing that is just too much to ask for. *sigh*

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