I had to change my cellphone recently since the battery life on my old phone dropped so much that I could only talk for about 5 minutes before it goes dead.
So, I rushed to my service provider last week to get a new one. My previous phone, a flip-top phone with color displays had lots of features that I’d never used and they certainly put a big drain on the battery. So this time, instead of getting a phone with all the bells and whistles, l asked the sales person to find a basic one that offers nothing more than long battery life.
To my surprise, after just two years, all the phones on the market have color screens now. Most of them enjoy new features from taking pictures on the fly to sharing data with your computers via Bluetooth. Some of them can even play MP3s. I insisted that I did not need all those features and it took the sales person quite a while to find me a very basic phone. At the end of the day, I was very happy since the new phone I got could give me hours of talking time without having to be recharged. But that left the sales person puzzled… since all phones I could get were free due to the service I have and why did I choose a cheaper model instead?
It is undeniable that given the pace of the development of technology, more and more products converge and more features can be added to a single product. People tend to love to get these new features even though they might never ever use. It is important however, for the designers not to forget what the main goal the product that they design.
For a cell phone, the single most important thing is how long does the battery last. Any other features are nice-to-haves but should not be added if they compromise this design goal of long standby/talking time. I am certainly not against such convergence products nowadays offer, but they ought to at least not sacrifice what they are primarily made for.
