just an asterisk

This, my dear readers is a telephone.  It has one function – you pick up that funky looking handle on the top and hold it to your ear.  Then you grab that doohickey on the side and crank it up.  Once completed, you can speak to someone on other end.  We refer to this procedure as making a “call”.

Apart from this “call” functionality, this object is nothing more than a paper weight – or something for braining your next burglar.  My point, that is perilously close to drowning in my sarcasm, is that the object has one function.  It’s a telephone.  That’s what it does and even in 1896, it did it pretty well (although Rikstelefon is no longer in business in Sweden).

A few days ago, a friend of mine was complaining that his GPS running application on his Iphone didn’t work perfectly – he wasn’t getting absolutely accurate readings while jogging… (cough) His phone was not giving him accurate GPS readings while jogging? This wasn’t even a complaint about the GPS while calling.

The Iphone is a very, very impressive device.  In a way, even calling it a phone first is misleading.  For example, here is an outdated list of 100 things that an Iphone can do.  The applications make the possibilities limitless and we find ourselves wondering “well if it can do that, then why can’t it do this?”  What is even more amazing is that often someone figures out how to do that (“that” being whatever you wanted to do with the Iphone in the first place).

I do have a teeeeeeeeeny little gripe with this idea of packing devices until they are feature heavy (which technology readers know as “bloat”), to the point that the fundamental use of the product is compromised.

In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence – The Peter Principle

My friend Michael gets full credit for this analogy, but it’s so delicious that I had to write it out.  The Peter Principle above is used in management – an employee who is promoted each time they perform well at their own level, will continue to be promoted until they achieve a level where they fail.  Your best employee might not be cutout to be your best manager.

Now back to the Iphone.

The GPS receiver in the Iphone is miniscule compared to that in your new car.  One review from Autoblog.com said:

Compared to a dedicated navigation unit, the iPhone just can’t compete with systems offering turn-by-turn directions and on-the-fly re-routing. However, its small size and ease of use would make it a competent companion for navigating through a city on foot. So aside from a few intermittent errors on both the phone’s part and our own, it’s safe to say that the 3G works as advertised: under-promising and only slightly delivering.

In a way, this is what we would expect right?  The Iphone is a phone, not an IGPS.  That said, to be able to use GPS on your phone, even crappy GPS, is great.  Shouldn’t we just be happy that it’s even possible?

The same could be argued for the Iphone’s digital camera.  Another review from a photography blog:

From a photographers perspective the iPhone 3G S is everything I wanted the iPhone to be when I first stood in line to buy one in 2006 2007… The iPhone is undeniably a great mobile phone and I can now say, finally, that the camera lives up to the rest of the phone.

Sounds positive right?  In the end, the reviewer is saying that he’s thankful the camera caught up to the quality of the phone.

Here is my theory in two parts:

1.  We want the camera and GPS receivers to stink when a cell phone is first released.  We want the company to have poured their development budget into the reason we’re buying a new phone – which I’m hoping everyone is thinking is to make phone calls.  Once the product is a great phone then we can think about upgrading the camera, as Apple seems to have done.  GPS is new, it’s going to take a while to siphon off enough budget to make it awesome.  Until then, chill out my friends.

2. We should want our good devices to stop adding features.  Does the Iphone need a missile guidance system?  My thinking is that although it would be really cool, I wouldn’t want it to take money from improving the call quality of the phone or improving the email functions or upgrading the GPS or upgrading the camera again or…  Adding missile guidance might just Peter Principle our phone, as we’d expect it to perform well…

In the end, I think my love of technology also causes some angst – I’m so excited to watch the world march forward that I despair when we waste momentum by proceeding in the wrong direction.  Feature bloat = wrong direction.

Not sent from an Iphone

~ab

UPDATE: I can’t even make this stuff up – Your Iphone can now be a stethoscope too!

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 11:33 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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