When was the last time you saw a fantastic phone? We don’t mean a phone with a great camera, or a tip-top music player. We mean a phone that’s fantastic for talking on. You know, like a phone should be.
The latest volley of handsets from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and LG all look lovely, and have some fantastic multimedia skills. But can you remember the last time you saw a genuine enhancement in talk-technology? No us neither. Read on, and we’ll tell you why.
Comes With Music, 12 megapixels, multitouch. They’re all lovely, but none of these flagship features help keep us in touch with anyone.
The Sony Ericsson Idou may have sent our jaws to the floor with its SLR-grade 12 megapixel camera, but it won’t help us order a pizza any quicker, with greater clarity or without sounding like we’re struggling to remember the toppings we want.
Likewise, LG’s latest Arena has a lovely new S-Class interface, which uses a 3D cube to keep different applications separate from each other, but if anything it means it can easily sweep the phone functions under a digital carpet and show off its other bells, whistles and DivX movie player.
So why have the mobile manufacturers given up on phone frills? Nokia could be the worst culprit. It seems to have stopped adding telephony extras in favour of music features, location sensing and N-Gage games. It’s even announced it’ll partner with Skype to add VoIP to its handsets, almost admitting the company knows more about internet calling than it does.
OK, so adding Skype is better than adding nothing at all, and at least Nokia’s doing a good job of the integration, building it deep into the address book too. But it’s strange that mobile manufacturers are busily trying to mould their devices into MP3 players, games machines, even projectors, and largely failing to add new phone features.
Nokia’s latest 5030 is a prime example: an ultra-cheap phone that costs just £36, and includes some impressive stats too. But rather than shout about the price, Nokia’s touting its FM radio as the main feature. It’s downright bizarre.
We’d love to see a phone firm step up with a handset that’s clearer than everything else, takes an innovative approach to call diverting, or even ties in neatly with new services like Google Voice.
The most recent innovation in telephony came with Visual Voicemail and one-touch conference calling on the iPhone, and those were announced over two years ago. Is it just us? Or have phone makers stopped making strides in the actual telephoning abilities of thier products?
