Dear fan manufacturer:
I recently purchased one of you floor fans. You know, the kind that blow air around my house when it gets warm. It does that very well. Here is my question. Why does my fan come with an eight page manual and a remote?
Dear air filter manufacturer:
Please read the above communication, and substitute “air filter” for “fan”.
Personally, I’m waiting for my phone to come with a remote. I have a little bit of room left in the drawer full of remotes I don’t use.
I get asked for basic phones every day, and every customer that asks thinks they’re the exception. They’re as much brainwashed by the advertising as the customer that says “I just want a phone I can show off to my friends”
There’s a market for simple phones, but there’s no bloody money in it. You gits would get such a phone keep it for six years, use it as little as possible and complain when it went wrong, coz it was built from cheap crappy parts to keep the cost down.
Muha! I just used that joke in a D&D campaign this weekend. We were trying to get into a door, and the person who was doing the puzzling sat down, frustrated, and I said, “The word is ‘Mellon’”. Everybody cracked up.
I do the above but I never complain about it. I expect the service to be at the level of what I paid for - miminal at best. If my TracFone actually exploded I might consider calling the company. Until then, it’s most likely my lookout!
So you **won’t ** be getting an iPhone this week?
I admit, part of me looks at that phone and drools. If they had it all sans the phone I might consider it. 
I have no need for a phone that plays songs on a tiny crappy speaker, movies on a tiny screen, bakes cookies, whitens teeth, causes brain cancer AND cures it, and requires more arms than an octopus to use all these features.
'Twas the iPhone that inspired the thread (as I already have a TracFone, on Mika’s suggestion.
I’ve got a Blackberry, which does have lots of features.
But everyone who has ever picked it up has been able to figure out how to use it in seconds. It’s the easiest phone I’ve ever had.
I’d buy it. And my older relatives would, too, especially if the keys were actually big enough to be read without glasses and punched by a person with arthritis.
This is going to be my new phone, arriving sometime next week. So I guess I’ve fallen for the “more features” thing. I do still have my first cel phone, a Nokia chocolate bar, er “candy bar” model, very basic, which I can still use if need be.
Primarily because you don’t make a product they want to buy. Your move.
My blackberry pearl was pretty damn easy to figure out. I never read the manual and I’m pretty frickin handy with it.
Ummm…is there something that forces you to use them? I’ve borrowed frriend’s RAZRs before, and I don’t remember the simple task of being able to send/receive a call being bogged down by those features.
It’s actually WORSE than useless because it tricks average, everyday, non-digital photography people into thinking they are getting valuable extra features and “adding value”.
In truth, Digital Zoom “deletes value” and takes away features. It actually destroys picture data because it crops out 3/4 of ther image without optically magnifying it at all.
And as many people (but not everyone) know-- the “digital zoom” part can be added quite simply once you download the pics to your computer.
This isn’t about a cell phone. It’s about a car stereo. This car stereo came with a remote.
I’m thinking…okay. It’s for a radio/CDplayer/tape player, which also gives the time, and you can also heighten the bass or the treble, or set the thing to play classical, or rock, or jazz, or something else (there’s something else?). All of this while you are, of course, driving. So naturally you need a remote.
It’s not like I’m gonna let somebody control the radio from the back seat. They want their own stuff, they can listen to their iPods.
So naturally about a year down the road something on the console malfunctions, so the only way you can adjust the volume is WITH THE REMOTE. Which is god knows where, right? Probably between the cushions in the back seat, so you’re blasting away and have to change the channel until you get stuck in traffic so you can go dig around and find the remote so you can lower the volume of the station you really want to listen to. WHILE YOU’RE DRIVING.
Think of it, if you didn’t have that remote you’d have to go buy a whole new system for your car, and wouldn’t it be fun to see what else they’ve added since then?
(Slight disclaimer. My cell phone has a spotlight. I love it…)
I’d like to know why my phone can only store fifty (or whatever stupidly low mumber it is) text messages before I have to start deleting them. How many extra could I store if they removed the PGA Golf game and gave over the freed up memory to storing messages? Now repeat that for the billiards game, tetris, the dozens of shitty prepackage wallpapers, the shitty ringtones, the metric buttload of photos and videos I can store? Why should the memory devoted to a few short pieces of text be such a big deal that I feel like I’m using a 1970s computer?
I know I don’t need a dazzling blue LED on every piece of electronic or electrical equipment I buy, but the manufacturers seem to disagree.
Look at these devices not as phones, but as communication devices. I’m not constructing a euphemism, but rather a different perspective. Communicating with people through voice only is convenient only some of the time. The advantage there is speed, ease and comfort. But it’s not the only method worth exploiting from a distance. Think about the advantages text can offer when you need to be discreet. Or a picture can offer when you’re away and need more than words to describe something. It’s not the features that are getting in the way and confusing people, it’s the implementation. Please don’t throw the baby out with the bath water… there’s some great stuff on your phones. It’s the implementation that blows. Count me in for the iPhone. And you don’t even need a manual to use it.
That, right there, is a thing o’ beauty. Well said.
