According to this story, all consumers really want is a simple cell phone: no camera, no MP3s, no TV. I could not agree more. Everywhere you look, in every ad, the cell phone companies and wireless providers are trumpeting phones with so much junk when all I want is a phone that makes reliable calls and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg—to buy the phone or to make calls. Oh, and could they make it durable, too?
Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn’t like using them to surf the internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn’t stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work.
I’ve been saying this forever. My ideal phone would synchronize its address book with my computer, would have Bluetooth so that it could do so wirelessly, and it could act as a wireless modem for my laptop on occasion. I know that sometimes I occasionally take photos with it, but they’re too dark and too fuzzy (it’s impossible to keep the lens clean). I don’t surf the net with it, I don’t want to watch TV on it (who wants to watch TV on a 2” screen? This is progress?), and I don’t want to listen to music on it. I have an iPod for that. The problem with putting too much stuff into one gadget is that when that gadget runs out of power or breaks, you’re down a phone, a camera, a PDA, and an MP3 player. Plus, as they’ve added features, the controls become ever more complicated to use. Turning off the volume on my phone is a four-step process, for crying out loud.
Waiting for Appleto design the iPhone
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