Remember old telephones? I mean those click dial rotary phones with the huge honkin’ receivers? They were big, but they fit your face as though they were designed to. The rest of the phone was (or at least seemed to be) designed around the receiver.
And they were comfortable to use.
I miss them.
They worked really really well. The sound quality was good. Dialing was a little wonky, but solid. The big problem was the whole tethering thing. You were stuck to a 6 foot radius from the base unit. (Though using one in a lightning storm for me had been a shocking experience more than once.)
So they figured that one out, and TADA, we had the cordless phone.
But the moment we disconnected the receiver from the phone, something strange started happening. There was this newfound notion that the receiver (now dubbed the “handset”) should be something that needed to be “convenient to carry around.” Designers seemed to be far more obsessed with advances in miniaturization than in ergonomics. Cordless telephones immediately started as these bizarre shapeless pod things, antenna on top, wide base for dock based charging,etc. They developed strange gummy safety buttons of some sort that never quite worked right. And from there they never changed.
Along come cell phones and the same obsession hits. Make it smaller, damn usability straight to hell. Cell phones have become utterly retarded in their form factor. Across the board. Yes even your beloved pepsi drinking iphone.
Unfortunately I can see the point in doing this with cell phones. Unlike wireless “handsets” you really DO carry cell phones around all the time, and minimizing the form factor does have practical utility.
10(ish) years ago we had the miniaturization obsession, and today we have a new one: Data Transfer Rates. Yes, after having settled in a groove with “as small as we can make it” we’ve now come to “as fast as we can get it there.”
Now we’ve got streaming internet updates of all sorts. GPS information, music and video to your phone…which has become too small to watch it on. Err… ok, they’re still dealing with that.
So here I am. It’s 2009 and I have one of these ubergadgets that houses more computational power than the world did in 1970*. The thing is sitting on my desk, between my forearms, charging, doing nothing.
Even when I use it, I don’t REALLY use it. It’s too hard to use. It’s as good as they get**. It’s got a touch screen AND a keyboard. It does all this wonderful stuff. But it’s just too compact to be useful. So my contacts aren’t up to date. My daily schedule isn’t on there. My todo list isn’t anywhere near it. Why?
Because when I get home or otherwise “return to base” where I’m sitting in front of a computer that I have at least marginal personalization ownership over, the FIRST thing I do is take the phone out, plug it in for charging and forget about it. Because when I’m sitting at my desk I have all kinds of things at my disposal that were designed for usability, not miniaturization. I have a 23” monitor, so I don’t have to watch youtube videos on a 2.5” lcd. I have some nice speakers attached to a real stereo, so I don’t have to listen to music coming out of peeping little craptastic earbuds. I have some real world-class computational power at my finger tips with custom built servers and processes giving me what I want (and things it thinks I might want) when I want it.
But when I want to make a phone call, I still have to resort to this little chirping thing that doesn’t fit against my head and sounds like crap.
NO NO! Bad monkey! No Biscuit!
Ya know what I really really want?
I want to come home, plug in my phone (ooh, perhaps even put it in to a DOCK which yes, is a weakness in this particular model) and I want my computer to absolutely take over. Sure, the data syncing would be all happy nice nice.
But I want my computer to adopt the addional role of “peripheral of my phone.” Give me a receiver connected to the PC so I can make calls with my phone. Give me a virtual desktop interface of some kind so I can run my phone’s applications from my machine. Stop forcing me to waste all that power and flexibility.
Some TVs have funky features like this. You’re watching television and a little “incoming call” thingie comes up with the caller ID information, etc. You hit a button and the sound goes down while you take the call.
If they LET me use my phone’s power when I’m at my desk then it will be a bigger part of my life. (sounds dubious I know.) It would serve the purpose of the 80’s filofax, which is impossible right now due to the horrible fragmentation between comptuer/phone environments. We all know what happens when you try to maintain multiple organizational systems… you don’t trust them because you’re never sure where anything REALLY is.
Cell phones aren’t things you hold to the side of your head. In fact they’re now starting to look like what they really are, little computational thingies that you carry around with you to manage your stuff, onto which ergonomic devices ought be attached (wired or otherwise.)
Let’s push them the rest of the way.
* Yes, I totally made that up. Flame me if you’re bored. I’ll shrug it off either way.
** Please don’t recommend your favorite cell phone to me. I probably have two of them already in a box. Yes, that includes the fanboi 1 and 2.
