jeff yen

I have fairly eclectic requirements for most every product I buy, particularly electronics. I am loath to part with my money unless I am faced with a product that does everything I expect it to do, or I can hack it apart to make it do everything I want it to.

This is the reason I don’t have a "smart" phone yet. There are major problems with every single platform out there, and after a while I just get sick of running into roadblocks and give up in frustration.

My basic requirements for a phone are:

 

Communications: 
Making phone calls is naturally of the first importance. But, as this is supposedly a "smart" phone, I also need access to all the methods of communication I normally associate with my computer, available over Wifi or cellular. That is:

• VOIP (Skype and/or Gizmo)
• Email (POP, IMAP, and web)
• IM (GChat, MSN Messenger, and AIm. QQ as a somewhat-necessary bonus).
• Web browsing, on a modern browser.

I also need well-implemented GPS, and the ability to tether my laptop to the phone, in case I need emergency net access somewhere I can’t get a wifi signal.

+ Nobody.
- Everybody. Android is probably the closest on this one.

 

Languages:
Being in China, having developed a rudimentary proficiency with the language, and most importantly, being in regular contact with people who have essentially no grasp of the English language, I need to be able to write, receive, and get help translating between English and Chinese.

Over here, any $50 Nokia cell phone has this capability, and I find it shocking that so-called "smart" phones generally lack this capability. The only phone OS that has excellent built-in support for this is iOS, which includes Chinese character handwriting recognition. Android basically has nothing that I can find or care to investigate further (everything I’ve found has been on the order of, "Oh, this project looks promising, you should try it out"). Maemo5 (for the Nokia N900) support, much like the expected longevity of the entire ecosystem itself, is laughable.

I want supported, retail-release-quality, first-party software. Right now only the iPhone has this that I can tell. The iPhone, and the $100 phone from Nokia I’m currently using.

Pathetic.

In an excellent illustration of what drives me further and further away from FOSS communities on a daily basis, one article, entitled "Full Chinese Japanese Korean (CJK) input on Nokia N900," recommends installing GNU Emacs, a full-featured text editor, typing the Chinese text in there, and then copy-pasting it anywhere you need it to. That’s not a solution, that’s a workaround, and a terrible one.

+ Apple.
- Everyone else. There are about 3 million third-party apps "in progress." None of them are good.

 

Battery life:
I need a phone that can, at minimum, last a full day of heavy use on a single charge. What genius thought it was a great idea, in this day and age, to build a cell phone that only lasted 3.5 hours on a charge? When my 3-year-old dual core laptop with a 14" screen lasts longer on one charge than your cell phone, then you have made a TERRIBLE CELL PHONE. If you have a giant screen on your phone, put a bigger battery in it. Nobody cares that it’s super-thin and sexy if you can’t take it anywhere because it’s constantly having to be charged.

I have a cell phone that lasts up to 3 days on a single charge, with regular voice and SMS use. It can also play and record videos, and plays MP3s with very nice sound quality. However, I still use my 5-year-old, AAA-using, Creative Zen Nano Plus MP3 player instead.

You know why?

Because, if I were to miss even the most trivial of phone calls, message, or meetings because my phone’s battery was dead, I’d feel enough of an idiot without having to explain that it was because I was listening to an endless loop of Baby Got Back while looking at kitten pictures on Facebook.

My cell phone is an important communications tool. If the battery’s dead, I can’t reach people that I need to reach, particularly since I haven’t memorized a single telephone number since the advent of the contact list.

So, seriously. If you put a 4" screen and a 1GHz processor in your phone, put in better than a 1500mAh battery or bundle an AA charger with it.

+ Nobody.
- Everybody.

 

User-serviceable battery:
If the battery in my phone craps out, I want to be able to put a new battery in it. I have three, count ‘em, THREE, Nokia batteries for my current phone.

The reason I have three? The first one died on me, so I bought a second one. The second one worked fine, but was a cheap knock-off, and was dropping in capacity, so I bought a new branded retail unit. After some time, I found the original and decided to try it, for shits and giggles, and it works perfectly. So now I have three Nokia phone batteries, each of which is able to power my phone for 48-72 hours without a break or a charge. I carry the two spares fully charged in my bag. They each cost less than $10 US.

They are also usable with about 90% of the Nokia phones I run into on a daily basis, so for example, if a friend’s battery dies, I can lend him/her one of mine.

If I owned an iPhone, in the above scenario I would now have two spare iPhones in my bag.

- Apple. Fuck Apple.
+ Everyone else.

 

Expandable memory:
If my phone’s memory is full of Lady Gaga music videos and Snuffleupagus porn, I want to be able to throw in a microSD card so I can continue stockpiling digital perversions of questionable legality. When that card fills up with dolphin snuff films and movies painstakingly tailored to induce grand mal seizures in dogs and small children, I want to be able to swap another one in… and so on.

If I take a whole series of pictures of homeless people selling me a dead dog, and my subsequent Thanksgiving dinner spread, I want to be able to pop out the SD card, throw it in my laptop, and copy the files over at full USB speed instead of having to fuck around with idiotic proprietary software and wifi or Bluetooth transfer speeds.

Most people are pretty good about this. Of course, by "most people" what I really mean is some Android phone manufacturers, and Nokia.

Windows Phone 7 lets you add an SD card… once. It is then rolled into the internal memory as a single integral file system. If you take the card out, it won’t work anywhere else. This is basically so the music and movies industry won’t take their balls (tiny and withered that they are) and go home. Thanks, DRM.

+ Everybody but Apple, and Windows Phone 7, with some exceptions based on phone model and OS.
- Apple, and Windows Phone 7.

 

Finally, a word on functionality. Phone and mobile OS developers: right now you are doing everything you can to make cell phones into little portable computers and entertainment media centers.

This is fine.

It’s also monumentally stupid.

I know that’s what sells units; I understand your average consumer loves to see little shiny UI elements fly around on their screen, spends hours playing Plants vs. Zombies while calls go to voicemail, and uses their monthly data transfer quota more for downloading Youtube upskirt video archives than sending and receiving communications with actual people.

I’m just saying, enough is enough.

Your phones all play music and video through painstakingly thought-out, beautifully designed, and precisely tuned interfaces, and have giant glossy screens and slide-out surround-sound speakers. You’ve spent countless man-hours developing the absolute best-looking way to have a UI element fade off screen after being dismissed, and different algorithms to index and search MP3 files on a memory card.

Fine.

Wonderful.

Just please, please spend some time now working on stuff that actually lets people get things done.