As my own small contribution to the literature on featuritis, here’s a personal illustration. My mobile phone isn’t anything fancy. It’s cheap and very basic by today’s standards. No internet, no camera, no MP3 player. I bought it because all I wanted to do was to make calls and send texts.
So here’s a list of what my “simple” Nokia 1100 can do, and what I actually do with it.
Features that I have:
- telephone
- SMS
- contacts
- call register
- choice of ring tones
- profiles (stored sets of settings)
- headset jack
- torch
- welcome note (customisable message when you switch on)
- call diversion
- automatic redialling
- speed dialling
- clock
- alarms
- reminders
- games
- calculator
- stopwatch
- countdown timer
- ringtone composer
- screensaver
Features that I use:
- telephone
- SMS
- contacts
- call register
- clock
Reducing the phone to this very limited feature set, one could dispense with the menu entirely and have a simple toggle between phone and text modes. Even better, work out a way invoking these functions implicitly rather than explicitly.
In its favour, the phone lasts more days on a single battery charge than most fancy smartphones will last hours, as the 74% of Japanese iPhone users that carry it as a second phone could probably testify.
Tags: iPhone, mobile phones, Nokia 1100, phones