A phone made of…
The question before us today is: why are mobile phones chock full of functional goodness when cordless phones can’t or don’t do a lot of the things that a mobile phone does? My really old mobile phone has an easy to use addressbook, a multi-line screen and buttons that are easy to press. My cordless landline phone has a single line screen that is hard to read, big buttons that are difficult to press and a 10-position address book that only stores numbers. Also, a cordless landline phone only has to transmit to a base station that is inside your house while a mobile phone has to transmit to a base station that is 5 kilometers away! Yet, the mobile phone is smaller, has better buttons (well, mine does), has an easy-to-use address book, is light and slips into a pocket. Weird. Why do cordless phones mock us so?
Merlin hates his phone with a passion. So much so that he’s made a pod-cast about it.
At the top of Merlin’s hates about his (cordless, landline) phone:
- buttons that suck
- Bad UI for:
- caller ID
- address book entries
- form factor
- weighs as much as a toddler
Merlin, of course, uses his extreme hatred of his phone to segue into a life lesson. As he points out, most things in your life are temporarily not broken. So that you know what you hate about your object du jour Merlin’s advice is simple: make a list. If you’re on Mac, Merlin suggests Quicksilver (which is free). I would use wikidpad which isn’t at all the same thing as Quicksilver but it works for me.
The reason cordless landline phones aren’t nearly as advanced as cell phones is that cell phones have replaced them. Simple enough concept.
Comment by Khaos — August 14, 2008 @ 12:38 am