As we are constantly bombarded with news of the latest mobile phone or smartphone offering even more amazing features from GPS navigation to social networking to enhance our lives and make them easier, Martin Cooper, credited as being the lead engineer of the Motorola team that developed the mobile phone, has said that today’s phones have become ‘too complicated’ and try to do too many things for too many people. He feels that when you create a universal device that does so many things for so many people, it doesn’t do any of these things well.
The alternative, according to Cooper, is rather to have several specialist devices that focus on one thing that will improve our lives. But is this really what consumers want? Would having to keep track of several different devices really be an ‘improvement’ in our lives, or would we rather take the chance that the features may not work as well as Cooper would have hoped in order to take advantage of another improvement in our lives – the convenience of having everything in the palm of our hand at the touch of a button? Sales figures suggest that consumers are seeking phones with a range of features, with smartphone sales across Europe increasing by 140%.
Dr Jon Argar of University College London feels that there is no reason to believe that people are avoiding complicated technology, or that smartphones don’t have the capacity to cope with the additions designers integrate into them. Ultimately, the future of technology is in the hands of consumers, and most of them would rather have all their needs met by one device than have to seek other devices to supplement the ones they already own.
Perhaps Cooper, who has previously criticised the iPhone for being complicated and hard to use, is still accustomed to the technology used to create the first mobile phone, which he describes as weighing “over one kilo and you could only talk for 20 minutes before the battery ran out, which was just as well because you would not be able to hold it up for much longer.” It is certainly true that with that kind of technology we would not be seeing the advancements in mobile phones we are today, but with that as a stepping stone and with the advancements in technology we have seen over the past decade, there is little doubt that not only will we keep seeing more new features available on our phones to make our lives easier, we will also come to expect and demand them, if we haven’t already begun to do so.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: consumers, GPS, Martin Cooper, mobile phone, Motorola, smartphone, social networking, technology
