Alison made a comment yesterday which deserved a place on the front page. It was in response to yesterday’s ‘The Smartphone Trap’ article-
I think that’s why ordinary folks (and by that I mean non – ‘powerusers’) just get a phone and enjoy it. The only thing I’ve ever heard any of them compare is the megapixels on the phone camera (which is pretty irrelevant when the aperture is like a tiny pin hole). In some cases it’s why they could be using a Symbian phone or an Android phone or a Windows Mobile phone and not realise it. The carriers re-brand those devices and if the user has been sold the phone based on how many minutes they can get with it, or because it has a decent camera, or because it includes GPS, they’re likely to remain blissfully unaware of a lot of the features.
When the Nokia N95 was available a lot of carriers offered very favourable minutes and text packages and quite a few of my friends got them. When I asked if they’d used the GPS, they replied that they didn’t know it had one!
HTC make several great phones with a range of different operating systems. They give them names, and then the carriers take them, rebrand them and give them different names, which again causes confusion so that users don’t really know which phone they have.
The one main exception to this is the iPhone. Regardless of which carrier you get it from, it’s always “The iPhone”, and when customers ask for it, it’s not because of the processor speed or the camera capabilities it’s because it has a lovely touch screen, thousands of apps, and can play their music and video.
There are lots of other phones that can do what the iPhone does (Android/WM/BlackBerry etc), but to consumers their capabilities can sometimes get lost because their branding and specifications aren’t as clear. Those same consumers will still buy those phones, but the way the phones are marketed and sold means that the specifications are not highlighted.
I agree, it’s what I’ve been saying for a while. Lots if people are carrying incredibly powerful devices around and only using a small portion of the power. But we do have to be careful, just because we think its cooll to be able to use our smartphone to do lots of things, doesn’t mean normal people do as well.
I also think part of the reason the iPhone is so successful is because it made things so easy. Getting media on any of the other devices is so hard, but everyone knows how iTunes works.
I wonder if the iPhone is changing that. I now see ordinary people discovering what we knew all along, that there is a lot which can be done with “just a phone.” The iPhone has made a lot of it more accessable to everyone. Soon it won’t be about about how many megapixels have you got… Where will that leave us “geeks?”
Well for all my friends and family who have iPhones I’ve become technical support – how do you do this? what app should I get for that? etc.