Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

How vs. what: Why so many new tech products fail outlines that we should focus more on what new products should be used for than how new technologies can enable new uses of those products. It's the old top-down vs bottom-up design struggle. When designing a product it's very easy to fall in the trap of thinking that more technology is inherently better, but that has some more or less serious implications:

• Products can be harder to understand and promote, unless the new features are defended by new valuable uses; it's those new uses that need to be described
• Products become more expensive for the manufacturer, and hence more pricey for the operators and consumers

Without going out on a limb, mobile phone design is plagued with 'how' thinking. In part because of the market's structure: Manufacturers rely on people in more mature markets to constantly upgrade their phones. If they didn't, the market would collapse. Hence (and similar to Microsoft Office): Features that are unmotivated from a usage perspective are added to sway consumers to upgrade. Also, operators rely on this to lock in subscribers on long term contracts.

That's why e.g. iPod (mentioned in the note) and mobile phones can't be compared one-to-one, as iPods are not sold in the same way as phones are. You might think that people would keep iPods longer, as they do exactly what people need, but it seems things like size and storage space plays a role in making people upgrade anyway.

Another "wrong" in mobile phone design is, at the other end of the spectrum, aesthetic design without motivation from a usability perspective. Examples are keypads that can't be used effectively, LCD displays that can't be viewed in sunlight, menu systems that are not logically structured, close to impossible to initiate the browser or launch downloaded applications. That's why I still wonder why the RAZR became so popular, considering its UI sucks. It's clear people were motivated by other things, like slick design, and that they anyway mainly make voice calls, so it might not matter if the other features are not useable.

Is this an incentive for making simple and inexpensive phones for people that don't need more? In theory that's definitely so, but would operators care much about phones that are so cheap they can't slap a 1-2 year subscription on top of it? Would manufacturers stop the feature war, understanding that people don't need more? A definite no.

Hence, another form of struggle occurs for mobile phones: Common sense (from a usage perspective) vs how to sustain long term profit.