HowardH
Active member
IPhone - the Smartphone for Dumb people?
Surur
I know you meant that in an almost offensive and antagonistic fashion, but it's really not that far from the truth.
As I iterated in another post, most of us here ARE experts, whether we like it or not. Or at the very least we'd be ADVANCED users. We're not the mainstream.
WM is still in many respects an ADVANCED device in terms of the knowledge required to operate it. But a feature rich device does not have to be difficult to use. Look at the iPod vs other music players. The gap has closed, but for years know the methodology for getting music onto my iPod has been "insert CD, dock iPod". That was it. Yet there is a flurry of devices out there that have much more complex systems for operation.
WM has jumped ahead leaps and bounds. But just like we can compare the simplicity of the former Palm OS devices vs with complex WM based PDAs and see the learning curve differential quite easily, I think it'll be the same with the iPhone. A smart but limited device that is easy to use. Will it do everything the Treo does? No chance. But how many of the Treo's bread and butter users DO use the advanced features? Very few, however the perception is skewed on a forum like this.
For those who work with Enterprise deployments of smartphones, it's quite clear that to the average user the Treo is being under-utilized in many areas. And the average user would not want to have to export contacts to an Excel spreadsheet etc. to be able to make LD calls. The average user would just want a device that works. And is pretty.
And the common argument against this sort of thing (iPod like simplicity) is that it's for "dumb people", which is just a reflection on the source of the statement not understanding anything about user experience. Smart people can operate dumb devices.
Why do so many North Americans buy cars with silly amounts of horsepower and then throw in an automatic transmission?? People want to pick and choose which battles they fight. Whether it's an manual transmission and clutch or having to manually encode, drag and drop.