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”.
Entry Filed under: Counterculture In technology, Mobile
3 Comments Add your own
1. who point oh | June 23rd, 2008 at 12:28 am
I’ve talkd some to people who work for companies that provide applications for mobile devices, and my sense is that the telecom companies are the bottlenecks here, not the market.
Lot’s of people would love an open OS for mobile phones, and Google’s Android interface does just this. According to C-Net, Android-capable phones will be ready in a few months.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9901954-37.html
2. Stewart | June 23rd, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Some service providers give you 2 weeks with a new handset they provide as part of your contract. If you and it don’t get on you can return it and choose another.
This seems like good sense to me. Who wants to be stuck with a phone they don’t like or can’t use for 12-18 months. And if you’re getting the handset through a contract technically the phone doesn’t belong to you so ebay isn’t really an option.
3. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino | June 29th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
The issue here is whether this particular disclaimer is even advertised at the point of sale, especially if you order your phone online. Who reads the manual or instructions these days?
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