Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
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Cornered! Father knows best: the handset is dead
Cornered! Father knows best: the handset is dead | Father knows best: the handset is dead |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Friday, 15 February 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 According to this report, in Wireless Week: http://www.wirelessweek.com/Cooper-Handset.aspx "Cooper said the term 'handset' should no longer be used. 'It's not a handset. It's a device that does what it's supposed to do naturally.' Instead, the phone – which is more than a 'phone' – should be identified by what it does, whether it be a music player, wireless camera or a life-saving device, he said." He also is reported to have said that: the best technology is totally transparent to the end-user; that this is not the case with mobile phones - where the instruction manual may be bigger than the phone itself; and therefore, the industry still has much to do to improve the end-user experience. How true. When HTC announced recently that Telstra was launching the new HTC Touch Dual on Next G, they gave me an evaluation unit. Without a manual. After struggling with it for a few days and getting rather frustrated (in all fairness I have never used a Windows Mobile device before) I asked for and received a manual: all 238 pages of it! Just 'Getting Started' (chapter 1) takes 36 pages. The unpopularity of manuals, the difficulty of using higher value mobile services and the potential revenue that operators miss out on was the subject of a recent survey by UK company SNAPin (whose software is designed to solve these problems and which has just been bought by Vodafone for global deployment ). |
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