Consumers Look For More Utilitarian Cellphones

hdtv writes "The Associated Press has an article about new generation of US consumers, who shun the mobile devices packed with features in favor of simpler devices that get the job done. One would think that as cell phones evolve into cameras, e-mail readers, Web browser and music players, mobile users would be happy with the device that fulfills their digital needs, but according to AP, 'a J.D. Power & Associates survey last year found consumer satisfaction with their mobile devices has declined since 2003, with some of the largest drops linked to user interface for Internet and e-mail services.'"

iWon is slashdotted - here's another AP link

[tepples]

You may have a better chance of success in RTFA if you get it from Yahoo.com [yahoo.com].

Correction: Not slashdotted, just bad CSS

[tepples]

Oops -- it was just a layout problem on iWon, affecting at least the Mozilla-based browser that I use. I saw a blank screen and didn't notice the scrollbar. Page down and I can RTFA.

Re:one would think?

[grotgrot]

Incidentally the "fewest dropped calls" thing is a spin on poor coverage. After all a call can't be dropped if you can't make it in the first place! I think one of the biggest problems is how the carriers nickel and dime their customers. For example Verizon Wireless have been trying to prevent getting camera images over a cable and forcing you to do it over the air (for a price). Similarly they arbitrarily remove Bluetooth functionality to prevent users from doing things that VZW can't get paid for each time.

Re:Wireless reception

[BrokenHalo]

the manufacturers are unwilling to make large phones with big aerials any more. If size doesn't bother you, some phones still have a sockets for an external aerial...

I would qualify that by suggesting an experiment. My LG U8120 works just as well (wrt both reception and battery-life) if I unscrew the aerial altogether. Which is why I replaced the standard fixture with a little stubby aerial, just to keep crap out of the hole.

Re:I'm the Opposite

[xiangpeng]

Nope, you're not asking for too much :) I am currently using a Nokia N91, which has a 4gb hdd, FM radio, decent 2mp camera, bluetooth, Wifi running on Symbian s60 3rd Ed. Prior to the N91, I use to carry around a RAZR and a 4gb Nano.

The main reason I switched over to the N91 is convergence. I wanna free my pockets of multi devices when I am travelling to work, without the hassle of finding all the devices to bring out everyday and having to dedicate more than 2 wall sockets to charging all my devices everyday(USB chargers don't count :).

Re:one would think?

[iangoldby]

There are cell phones like this you know. I haven't researched the subject myself, except to say that I have a Motorola C115. It is tiny, it does voice calls and text messages, and if you only turn it on briefly once every few days or so, the battery lasts for more than six months (yes, really). I've had mine nearly a year now and only charged it twice.

No it's not! Why are we always stuck with v1.0?

[mattbee]

Sorry, as a gadget lover I've seen tons of phones come close to being fantastically useful as the grandparent poster describes. However the problem is *always* in the frigging software. There is always some stupid bug (or six) which stops a phone fulfilling its advertised potential, but the manufacturer doesn't give a toss about fixing any of them because they're busy redesigning the next model (or six) with completely different interfaces, e.g. my Nokia 9500 [nokia.com], bought March 2005. Hooray! A phone, web browser, email client and remote SSH terminal with 80x24 screen! Wi-fi support at home! Amazing! Except that:

• the IMAP email client is hopelessly broken, crashing at the slightest provocation (changing folders mostly!)
• the web browser, for all its other limitations, doesn't do gradual page rendering (well it tries, but effectively it doesn't), and freezes the phone up while rendering a long page. Not good when you have a 14Kb GPRS connection;
• the terminal works well (cough, third party software) but is hamstrung by the phone's refusal to change connection types if the first one you pick doesn't work. You have a 10 minute timeout or something so that if a wi-fi connection doesn't work, you can't immediately switch to GPRS without going for a cup of tea first.
• (unforgivably, for Nokia, at least) if you missed a call and want to see who it was, you press "last call log" from the front panel and it takes 10-20 seconds of "Reading log..." on the screen before it shows you. A list of numbers! That's all I'm asking for! Totally maddening.
• No reset mechanism except taking the battery out. Because it will never crash, oh no. Especially not in the middle of a busy street when you're trying to make a call and then have to find a quiet place to take the f--king thing to pieces...

Now under normal circumstances, well, yeah you get bugs in software, we'll get them fixed! Except that you don't with phones. I had three firmware upgrades to that phone and none of those issues were solved. So I never really used it for email or web browsing unless I had a lot of time & patience, and it was very important to try to get a particular piece of info (still it was quicker calling the train times information line than trying to use the web site).

But really there was nothing wrong with the hardware -- I could see that the phone could do everything that it advertised, but Nokia were on to greener pastures now that this phone was out of the door. All it would need (in any other software market) would be a programmer or two, 2-3 months and some willing "power user" beta testers to hammer out these stupid bugs. I mean god forbid they actually try to make a device with a market lifespan of more than about 12 months, with, you know, a user community and long term support plans. But just a bit more love on the software after release would make a huge difference.

After a couple of terrible months with an HTC Universal [engadget.com] (lots of problems but the biggest one is that it's impossible to answer an incoming call more than about 20% of the time! Great testing guys!), like an idiot I'll have a Nokia E61 [nokia.com] on order soon. Maybe that'll work better :-)

So no I don't believe phone "convergence" is a myth when the phone manufacturers get so darned close. It's their unwillingness to go the extra mile after the phone has been released and tested on a large scale which causes people to damn their gadget-phones as white elephants.

Re:one would think?

[ilyag]

Yes, in the US you do pay to receive cell phone calls. On the other hand, calling a cell phone costs exactly as much as calling a landline. If it's a local call, it's 0.00 dollars /minute. From other places/countries, it's cheap.

All in all, it's a different pricing scheme that usually results in the same net charges for average use of the phones.

By the way, I don't know about USA as a country that "prides itself on its innovation and technical advancement"... Maybe it does, but it is definetely not Japan.

The "features" usually have strings attached!

[King_TJ]

I think many consumers would be more accepting/willing to tackle a learning curve to use advanced features of their phones if providers quit trying to use them all cash "cash cows".

I've been using PDA phones for years, and after my Treo 650 just got run over by a car after it fell off my belt-clip in a parking lot at work, I finally decided "Screw it!" and went with a regular phone instead. I got the new Motorola Razr V3c, thinking the thin shape would be a nice break from carrying around "brick-like" boxes as phones.

The biggest shock I got was when I first went through the Razr's menus and realized practically *everything* was a "subscription-based" download. Want your phone to be able to play a game? Navigate through the "e-store" applet and pick one out that can be played 1 day at a time for 99 cents, or played for "flat rate" of $4.99 per month! Uh... wow.... I'm used to just grabbing some freeware or shareware Palm app and hotsyncing into my phone and being done with it.

Then you get to things like emailing photos to other cellphone users. Ok, sounds like it might be cool, once in a while.... but WAIT! Did I sign up for that "unlimited photo-email" package on my plan? If not, I'm gonna get billed some ridiculous price for each little picture that gets sent out! Maybe I'll just ignore that feature after all.....

Oh yeah... they said the Razr was compatible with AOL instant messenger! Ok, where's that in the menus? Oh... darn. Not there! You have to download it and once again, PAY for it. Well, ok... I can live with spending another $7 or $8 to have that on my phone. But NO, it's yet another thing you pay by the month to keep using on the phone! Grr.... forget it! I'll just use it as a *phone* then and forget all the other stuff. I'll go broke trying to play with all of it!

Re:not surprising

[esper]

Is your phone not customizable?

You forgot the related question: How persistent is the customization?

My phone is a Motorola V600 and the one non-basic feature I use on it is Bluetooth. Unfortunately, it has a habit of occasionally deciding that the reason it can no longer see a Bluetooth device is not because the device has been turned off or gone out of range, but rather that the phone's own Bluetooth hardware has failed, so it shuts that part of itself off and any attempt to turn it back on is met with the error "BLUETOOTH MODULE NOT ATTACHED". The only way to get it working again is to do a "Master Reset", which also discards all customizations.

Considering that I end up having to do this, on average, every 2-3 weeks, my phone may as well not be very customizable, as I don't have the patience to go through and repeat customizations beyond noise and light settings to turn off some annoying bits that are on by default. (Do NOT beep every time a button is pressed! Do NOT make flashy lights all night that keep me awake to indicate that you're charging!)

1. You don't HAVE to buy a feature-intensive phone.

Actually, yes, I do. AFAICT, they don't make Bluetooth phones that I can use to get my laptop online anywhere there's a cell signal which don't also include cameras, MP3 players, IM clients, Java games, kitchen sinks, etc. (And before you say I don't HAVE to have Bluetooth... it makes my life a hell of a lot easier when a client calls with a problem and I can hop online and fix it from wherever I happen to be without having to run off in search of internet access first.)

GSM phones don't sync the time...

[YesIAmAScript]

At least in the US.

They keep time perfectly, because TDMA (GSM) is built around dividing time into precise parts. Also, in most areas, they'll even adjust the time when daylight savings occurs. But they don't actually sync the time.

So, on GSM in the US, if you set your phone 5 mins fast, it'll stay 5 mins fast forever.

CDMA (Cingular/Verizon) do sync the time. You just turn your phone on and it picks up the time from the service.

Re:That's cuz all the simple phones are in......

[Anonymous Coward]

That $20 lasts me barely a week, so when all the crap is added up it turns out to be TWELVE times as expensive as the service I was used to. And on top of that, of course, coverage SUCKS. And when I'm in an area with no coverage at all for a few weeks, I come back, and find that my prepaid phone, with a positive balance, has been turned off - apparently because one is required to add money every month whether you're using it or not, or else you lose it.

This was with T-Mobile, who were reputed to have by far the best coverage in the area I was in, by the way.

The way it works with prepaid is totally clear from their website [t-mobile.com]. Yes, the minutes expire in a month when you upgrade with $10. If you don't want that, don't upgrade with $10, duh.

I have a T-mobile prepaid too and upgrade with $100 increments, which stay valid for a year, and give you 1000 minutes of airtime. $0.10/minute is pretty reasonable for a prepaid phone, methinks.

Great phone. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're looking for a bare bones phone, I would highly recommend the Nokia 1100. It's small, reliable, and the battery seems to last forever. No fancy stuff--just a fine basic phone.

Re:No it's not! Why are we always stuck with v1.0?

[wintermute000]

Agreed!!!

The last 'new-gen' phone I got was a Nokia 6230 which I went for due to (what I thought) was MP3 support. That was ALL I wanted: voice, text, MP3. Got a 1 gig MMC card. Then I realised:

a.) Proprietary dock, no headphone jack, nokia headphones bite. OK no big deal, i had read about this online, and purchased a 3rd party nokia port --> headphone jack thingy from ebay for like 30 bucks. I'll deal with it.

b.) To take the MMC card out requires taking the battery out and restarting phone, no plug and upload/download. A pain when you're a music geek

I can live with the above two as mere annoyances, then the real whoppers

c.) Phone cannot play files even alphabetically or via a playlist, it always plays MP3s in the EXACT ORDER THEY WERE UPLOADED. And you need to manually create the playlists in an external program, then upload them to a special hidden folder. God forbid, if you changed the file structure on your card and had some out of date playlists referencing non-existent files, the thing crashed.

= every time you wanted to put a new CD onto the thing it took 10 minutes of fscking around.

Then d.) The random crashing hit and I gave up, bit the bullet and bought a replacement for my (terrible but at least it worked, but that's another story) Creative Nomad. hehehe.

Seriously, it was only a minor software issue that prevented the phone from playing MP3s in ALPHABETICAL ORDER FFS its not a big deal eh. Instead they make you jump through hoops. What about UMS browsing of file contents w. normal 3.5mm headphone jack and normal USB connection. Its not technologically advanced or costly is it!!! All that phone needed to become that mythical phone+ipod combo was a USB dock, normal headphone jack, and MP3 functionality like any cheap flash player.

I'm thinking all someone needs to do is design an elongated phone case over any normal candy bar phone, and cram a flash MP3 player into it, viola