What Apple Has To Teach
I’ve never been a huge fan of Apple. Their devices look great, and operate smoothly, but they’re a little too obsessed with simplicity, and they will often achieve it by removing functionality from a device. My iPhone, for example, can’t connect to my home network: it simply doesn’t provide access to the settings required.
But this isn’t always a bad thing. For some devices, simplicity is more important than functionality. Phones, in my opinion, are among these, and I’m not alone. More and more, people are finding advanced features of phones far too difficult to use. Even simple ones aren’t easy, because phone makers won’t give up on the notion that more is better. After all, you can just ignore functions you don’t want, can’t you?
Well, no. Extra functionality is what makes phones a pain to use. It’s why you have to go through three menus on many phones to send an SMS: for the very occasional time when you want to send a message as an email instead, or as an MMS.
This functionality is rarely used, so why provide it? Why can’t phones just guess what you want, particularly in areas where they’d almost certainly be right.
Note that, while my iPhone can’t get on to wi-fi, I don’t switch to another phone, because I can deal with small problems. I can accept that my phone can’t copy or paste, because it makes everything else so easy that I’m willing to live with it. It guesses what I want, and sometimes it makes a hash of it, but rarely.
It’s wonderful to see Microsoft learning from this, with concept screens from their upcoming system showing a much more user friendly interface. I just hope that everyone else catches on, or else I expect we’ll end up with about as much competition in phones as we have in MP3 players.
