What’s your mobile threshold?

Nevermind younger people, sometimes I don’t even get people older than me. Let me explain.

I was speaking to my sister-in-law today and she’s just gotten a new phone, switching from whatever she had before to a new manufacturer (I’d rather not say who, might get me in trouble :) ).

She’s had this new phone for a few weeks and finding the interface too much of a hassle to deal with, decided she was going to put the phone on Ebay, get the money back and revert to using her old phone for another year until the contract expired.

It’s incredible to think that this might not actually be an “extreme” behaviour, but simply a reaction to bad user interace or user experience on the phone. What she’s doing is also not informing the company that their UI might be difficult to adapt to, but simply let’s them get on with business as usual. There is currently no way to switch phones on the basis of bad interface but maybe there should be. Clearly the mobile market does not yet allow space for this kind of new business to co-exist along it, but prefers to turn a blind eye and let it live in the “underground economy”.

3 comments June 22nd, 2008