Ian Hay, who works for Orange in the UK, has an interesting post entitled “Ten Things I Want from You,” about customers’ mobile telephony needs. Here’s mine:
- Make voice work better, much better; everything else is secondary.
- Improve coverage; I don’t want to know where my phone works but my wife’s doesn’t, or vice-versa. I want them to work everywhere.
- Give me a great address book, one that is easy to use and easy to sync with other devices and data stores.
- As others have requested, make battery charging simpler and more consistent: can we please finally standardize chargers?
- VoiceML?
- Sell unlocked phones. Please. I’ll even pay a bit more for the ‘privilege.’
- Design and sell great simple phones. I’m not old, I’m not stupid, I’m not p
oor. But I don’t want a radio/camera/nose hair trimmer/flashlight in my telephone. I’m not even sure why I need a color screen, honestly. I want a phone that has great battery life, good sound, easy to use keys, a functional address book, and is sturdy enough to stand up to being chewed by my toddlers. Something like Motorola’s new Motofone seems to fit the bill quite nicely. - Give me browser-based control over my telephone’s configuration. I’ll do the set up in the convenience of my own office with a big screen, not pecking away at tiny keys and absurdly complex one-off menu trees.
- Likewise, let me manipulate data (primarily address book information) online and then send it to my phone. I still don’t know how to put photos on my current (camera-less) phone, for example.
- Fix Bluetooth; it’s too hard to set up, it’s too idiosyncratic in its implementation, and it doesn’t work as well as the wires it tried to replace. But, really, I’d be happy with the first couple of requests; I don’t need Bluetooth, but I sure do need an address book that approaches the functionality of a late-1990s Nokia. (Which, now that I think of it, had an infrared port for exchanging addresses. So If I had eleven choices, my eleventh would be an IR port.)
