March 31, 2005 It's Not Just a Phone, It's an Adventure By MICHEL MARRIOTT and KATIE HAFNER http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/technology/circuits/31fone.html?8dpc=&page wanted=print&position=
Larry Azlin, a software engineer in El Cerrito, Calif., considers himself one of the lucky ones. His aging clamshell cellphone, a Motorola V60, seems to work just fine. But once he gives it some thought, it occurs to him that he does have a few complaints. "The buttons on the sides are a bit annoying," he said. They seem to do different things when the phone is open and when it is closed. His biggest complaint is that the phone insists on making noise at every opportunity. "You can't even turn it off without it making a sound," he said, noting that when he tried to discreetly silence the phone at a concert, it squawked. Mr. Azlin is hardly alone in being confused and confounded by his cellphone at times. Gone are the days when the most one expected from a mobile phone was to place or to receive a call. In recent years cellphone makers have tended to view their products, which millions of people press to their faces every day, less as phones and more as platforms for services and features. Practically every new iteration of cellphone promises more: digital music, streaming video, 3-D video games, location-based navigation and full Internet browsing, not to mention a camera. With more features often come more buttons, complications and costs, and thicker operating manuals. Some people call it feature creep. Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for the NPD Group, a market research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y., said he had seen "a little bit of response" from cellphone makers to do away with arcane key combinations and with making users mine through menus to accomplish the most basic of tasks. But "the customer for handsets really isn't the consumer," he said. Rather, it is the carrier. At a wireless trade show this month in New Orleans, carriers like Cingular and Verizon Wireless spoke repeatedly about the importance of providing services that would further drive the average revenue per user on their voice and data networks. Mr. Rubin said creating phones that encouraged consumers to browse the Web, to upload videos and to download ring tones, for example, was good for the industry's bottom line. James Burke, senior director for North American product operations for Motorola in its headquarters in Libertyville, Ill., near Chicago, acknowledged that "phones are clearly getting more and more complicated in terms of what we can put into them." But he said better and cheaper technologies gave cellphone operators more opportunities to "really address consumer needs." "My sense is that technology is a bit dangerous here if done wrong, jamming every feature in like a Swiss Army knife," Mr. Burke said. "You get into trouble with the consumer. But if done right, it can really be enabling. It can be very powerful." He cited two phones expected soon from Motorola - the E815 (scheduled for the first half of this year) and the E725 (scheduled for the second half) - as examples of how to do it right. The E815 features a large keypad and well-spaced buttons beneath a large color screen. The combination makes it easy to create and send text messages, he said. The E725 is a "slider" phone, with its display panel and scroll wheel sliding up to reveal a 12-button keypad for simple navigation. Still, both phones are laden with functions. They offer high-speed uploading and downloading of pictures and files. The E815 has a 1.3-megapixel camera; the E725 will have a VGA camera, dedicated music keys, a five-band graphic equalizer, audio synchronized rhythm lights and up to two gigabytes of storage on an optional removable memory card. "I don't think we're overserving people," Mr. Burke said. John Chier, a spokesman for Kyocera Wireless, which is based in San Diego, said his company's research had affirmed that "people wanted a phone that was easy to use." But he asserted that the solution was not to create lots of stripped-down phones. In the end, Mr. Chier said, cellphone makers have little to distinguish themselves beyond the way they combine and arrange features. "As manufacturers, we are pretty much painting from the same technology palette." One effort to make things simple is Kyocera's SoHo cellphone, a "voice-centric" phone in limited release in North America. Its exterior has sharp, angular lines, but the clamshell phone offers little more than a large keypad for making calls and text messaging. It has no camera, but predictive text software, voice-activated dialing and a speakerphone. On the other hand, Kyocera's Slider Remix KX5, due in August, is a multiuse phone that shoots video and 1.3-megapixel pictures, plays music files in MP3 and AAC (the format used by Apple's iPod), and much more. More important, Mr. Chier said, the Slider Remix will be easy to use with its pinwheel-like controls and - yes, Mr. Azlin - a one-touch silence button. One way Nokia is making its cellphones easier to use is its adoption of a standard interface, which is the basic button and menu system common to all of its phones. This sort of familiarity can be attractive to consumers shopping for a cellphone, he said, especially if they are shopping for a replacement. "One thing we've learned over the years is that no matter how cool a feature is that we put into a phone, if it's not easy to use, people won't use it," said Keith Nowak, a Nokia spokesman. Mr. Azlin, the software engineer in California, just switched to a Nokia 6230. He says it has been easier to use than his old Motorola. "The menu system is much more logical than Motorola, and the five-way scroll selection button is pretty easy to get used to," he said. Josh Kerwin, a spokesman for Microsoft, said the use of Microsoft Windows in millions of personal computers and laptops can also foster ease of use in cellphones with the Windows Mobile operating system, like Samsung's i730, a hybrid phone and organizer with a thumb keyboard. For example, Windows Outlook and Media Player basically look and operate the same in the i730 as they do in a late-model computer using Windows XP. For some consumers, a cellphone just needs to be a cellphone. Samsung says it is responding by offering the x475, a dual-screen phone with an easy to read and easily accessible keypad, a bright color screen inside and a large-type gray-scale display on the phone's cover. The x475's appeal, its makers say, is in the ease of making and getting voice calls. Simple. Or perhaps too simple. Keeli Shaw, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, said she was happy with her simple cellphone, a blue Samsung SGH-r225m, which came free with her T-Mobile service. She described it as the Atari of the cellphone world. At a recent meeting of international students, a young Dutch woman asked if she could borrow it. "I pulled it out and her response was, 'Your phone is so, well, primitive,' " Ms. Shaw said. Nonetheless, "it works just fine," Ms. Shaw added, "and I think I would get confused if I had a mini-computer type of cellphone. Too many choices and options." You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
