I gotta vent on this one. Cellphones, love them or hate them, you have to admit that the service is generally crappy. I’m not talking about the legendarily poor customer service. I’m referring to the actual service itself. You know, the ability to transfer a voice from one phone to the other without dropping any information.
Rewind to the 80’s and rich guys carried around portable phones in huge hand bags. The reception was spotty, the calls got dropped and you sounded like you were in a tin can. The upside of carrying around a car battery with a receiver glued to it was that you could put it under your car’s back tire if you were parked on a steep hill.
Jump back to 2006 and anyone can carry around portable phones in their pocket. The reception is spotty, the calls get dropped and you sound like you are in a tin can. The upside? Aside from not needing a caddy for your phone I don’t see any upsides. “But I can take pictures, play games and I have a calendar on my phone!” You might argue. Ok. I’ll give you that. You can take a really crappy picture and have a calendar that gets erased if you need to change the battery. If you want to squint at a 300 x 300 pixel screen for your gaming experience, you go ahead and do that four eyes.
Feature Creep is what is killing cell phones. If companies focused on actually getting the damn things to do what they are supposed to do, namely send voice from person A to person B, we could have a decent cellphone system. But alas, that is not what the marketing gurus have decided. After polling a couple dozen teenage girls at the mall, they have decided that we need a 350 page manual for our phone. My computer didn’t even come with a 350 page manual. Why the hell do I need one for my phone? I say focus on making cellphones actually be phones not some horrible frankenstein machine that kinda, sorta, does a dozen other things. Until then I will loathe every time I hear that fake phone ring sound.
Grrr…