Mannerisms

On Friday night, John, the landlord of my local, showed me the new phone he'd bought his wife to replace one she'd dropped. A three function - talk, text and camera - phone, it cost £14.99 from Carphone Warehouse.

As someone who'd spent all week trying to establish the connections, GPRS and UMTS, to get my more sophisticated phone to connect to the Internet, I began to think my landlord was right. On common sense issues landlords usually are, though on political ones they can be alarming.

Throughout the week, I had struggled, my IS department at work had struggled, and various friends had struggled to get the thing to connect to email, to the Internet, to the office Intranet and to operate as a modem connecting my laptop to the cellular network. All had failed.

At the weekend, several more frustrating calls to my network provider told me I needed to put in various settings. Why weren't they already in there?

When it did connect, the only thing it would connect to were the home page of the
network operator wanting to sell things. Email wouldn't work. The office Intranet couldn't be connected. It could not connect up as a modem for my laptop.

Then I remembered Mrs Thatcher and her dictum: 'You can't buck the market'. After a week in which two of the biggest sellers of chips for mobile phones, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments, had bemoaned the fact that the market had moved towards low cost simple phones, and away from high cost, complex, 3G phones, it was clear what I had to do. Take the thing back and get a low-cost, simple, three function phone.

It seems to me that, if the market trend is to be reversed, and people are to be persuaded to buy the complex phones, then either the manufacturers must ensure they work straight out of the box, or the retailers must have, at the point of sale, some kind of 'calibration' service which sets up the phones to work
properly before the customer leaves the shop.

Last week, both the CEO of STMicro, and the CFO of TI, were wondering, hoping, that the move away from complex phones was a glitch in the market.

It should be obvious to everyone that consumers are not going spend their money on products
which take many hours of frustrated effort to get up and running, with no guarantee that the products will ever do what they purport to do on their glossy boxes.

It may well be that mobile phones have exhausted their capacity to add useful functionality beyond the functions of talk, text and camera. Like calculators, they may be on a commoditisation path leading, in a few years, to their ultimate distribution channel - inside Christmas crackers