In the race for the perfect (best?) mobile phone, we have forgotten what a phone really is.
We started out by having a large, clunky mobile handset, and focused on downsizing it until we reached the point of absurdity. The big challenge seemed to be maintaining the basic phone features, like voice calling and texting (SMS).
Then, PDAs started popping out, and the debate shifted from “who has the smallest phone” to “who will win the day: phones or PDAs”. But PDAs are now so 2001. We now have “smartphones”. And, for some reason, the Personal Digital Assistants actually grew a bit larger, and are called “netbooks” these days. And so the debate goes on: Laptops, netbooks or smartphones. But I digress.
Next in line, we had two additional forces:
- The Blackberry, which enabled us to receive emails on our phones (by “pushing” instead of “pulling”).
- Windows Mobile, which tried (and still does) to turn our phone into our “PC away from our PC”.
And then, of course, for a bit over a year now, came the iPhone.
About Focus and Handset Choice
So now, when you choose a mobile handset, you really have to consider the feature you are most interested in, and base your handset choice accordingly. Options are probably:
- Make voice calls (talk)
- Read emails, and maybe use the internet a bit (communicate)
- Run applications, and I don’t really care if they work (run apps)
- Ultimate coolness
It is quite the common assumption that cool = iPhone. Problem is, you can’t talk and be cool at the same time. The iPhone is a great piece of electronics, but it is not a phone – with call quality issues irritating users and a non-existent physical numeric pad, it is quite hard to actually use the iPhone as a phone.
So how about going for a Windows Mobile handset, which can run you apps. Well, then you get pure mediocrity with no focus at all. Why? Because the OS is not targeted at a specific device, but is a general purpose one, which leaves too much work for ODMs.
For some reason, handset vendors weren’t able (yet) to come up with a solution (smartphone?) that CAN achieve two of the above options, and do a great job at it – they always compromise. The good news is that they are constantly improving, and so maybe one day, we will be able to choose more than just a single option as the focus for our phone. In the meantime, however, it’s a hard choice.
I, personally, will opt for talking. Being a workaholic, I prefer not having the other features at all on my mobile handset.
What is your smartphone’s focus?
Tags: Blackberry, iPhone, netbook, odm, PDA, quality, Smartphone, Windows Mobile
Comment or trackback
1. Michael | April 13th, 2009 at 5:46 am
Internet, Internet, Internet. Talking is almost out of the equation for me and if I do I usually place VoIP calls using the software keyboard that my application provides. Granted, usability is important, but does it really matter whether a phone has physical keys or not? Let’s be honest: Dialing phone numbers is a thing of the past anyway that (hopefully) will become obsolete rather sooner than later.
Apart from that, you need not look around to much to find call quality issues for nearly ANY phone if you ask the “right” people. Apple has had to adjust certain things, but these days the iPhone performs just as well as any other handset on the market with the option to do so.much.better. Just install Skype and you will get state of the art audio quality that operators were unwilling to provide for decades.
“I, personally, will opt for talking. Being a workaholic, I prefer not having the other features at all on my mobile handset.” Then you don’t need a smartphone… at all. What you’re promoting are single-purpose devices that are great at but one thing and require you to stuff your pockets with half a dozen of gadgets that all excel in their respective discipline.
The iPhone is a nearly perfect convergence solution that leaves very little to be desired (says a WM user
) and will get even better in June. The margin by which a single purpose device performs better will become smaller yet again, reaching the point at which many users can’t be bothered anymore to carry that separate phone or MID with them because the smartphone replaces both of them 99% of the time.
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