Let me preface by saying that this short essay has nothing to do with TV on your mobile phone. Now that's out of the way, let's get to the business of the day.
Your smart phone is NOT a TV. You see, your old mobile phone used to be. But your new "smart" mobile phone is no longer.
Yep, you heard correctly. I know, I know, it's sounds crazy, but there IS actually some logic to the statement. TV's are, for the most part, dependable. You turn them on. Turn them off. Change the channel. Perhaps adjust some color & volume settings. Day in and day out, your TV just works. It turns on (unless of course it's broke). The volume goes up and down (unless the TV's speaker is broke). The channels change (unless your remote control is out of batteries and you forgot how to change the channel manually). You never have to reboot your TV, although that may change in the near future. Your TV doesn't freeze up in the middle of your favorite TV show, causing you to miss the suspenseful ending you've been waiting all week to see. You don't receive a "forced close" error while tweaking the brightness setting.
Mobile phones used to be the same up until a few years ago. You'd turn them on. Turn them off. Place a call. Add a contact. Maybe even send an SMS if you were really cutting edge. No error messages. No freezing. No running out of memory. Your old mobile phone just worked, unless of course it was broke. Those days are long gone, and there's no looking back. Your new smart phone is no longer a TV. It's a computer. Nokia's been saying it for years (calling some of their smart phones "Multimedia Computers" much to the giggles of many so-called industry experts). But they were absolutely correct. Perhaps they realized years ago that they needed to transition user's expectations to that of a computer and not of a TV (which clearly failed). Why? Simple, computers are so complex that not only is the learning curve to use them much higher than those of other consumer electronics, but also because the operating systems that computers run on are buggy. The greater the flexibility, the more issues you're surely to encounter. It only gets worse when you add the ability to run apps.
Ah yes, apps are to blame. And the more powerful the OS allows the apps to be, the greater the chances the user will run into some issue or another. The reason why the iPhone is far less buggy than a Windows Mobile Phone? The "apps" that you can build on the iPhone give little more flexibility than that of a simple, mundane Java app, while Windows Mobile allows much greater flexibility and power when it comes to building apps. Mobile Apps are a classic catch-22 - they are the driver of the enormous growth in smart phone sales, but at the same time, they're the cause of most of the consumer anger and complaints. Apps, and the underlying OS that allows you to install and run them, are why your new smart phone freezes, requires frequent reboots and can go from a full battery to a dead battery in 1 hour flat. In all fairness to Apps, I have to admit that a lot of the time, it's the OS to blame, even though most users are quick to fault the app that just crashed. Which is ironic. The same user would instantly blame Windows if their word processing application froze. Yet they do just the opposite when it comes to their smart phone and blame the app when the OS is actually to blame (another mental break when it comes to smart phones, along the same lines as the main theme of this article).
Yet, now that we're at a point that it's no longer power users, technology geeks and early adopters buying smart phones, and the average joe, housewive and your 80 year old grandma are buying them in droves, you can start to see why Nokia was calling them "Multimedia Computers" so early on. The average joe, housewife and your grandma expect their new smart phone to be as dependable as their old mobile phone, which was as dependable as a TV, instead of transitioning to the expectations of that of a computer. Unfortunately the days of your mobile phone behaving like a TV are long gone. Smart phones are here to stay, and with the millions of variables and scenarios that are created by an incredibly small yet highly sophisticated device that is able to utilize multiple communication channels (GSM (various bandwidths at that), WiFi, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G, etc), take photos, give you driving directions using GPS, play music & games, display live & pre-recorded video, accept input via SD & USB, install & uninstall applications that in some cases can interact with core device functionality including calls & messaging, not to mention the countless built-in features such as the calendar, contacts, calculator, media gallery, app store, office apps, logs, email and more. It's easy to see that it's simply impossible to provide an issue free experience when there's so much going on.
So no, your new smart phone is NOT a TV. Get over it. The occasional freeze, crash or memory error are par for the course now, and as you expect more out of your mobile, expect things to only get worse. If you would have listened to Nokia years ago you would have realized your smart phone is now a computer.
As always, Stay killer my Friends
Chief Killer
a.k.a. "Josh"
