Escalating Feature Lists

What factors now influence your next mobile phone? I've just taken ownership of a HTC Touch HD, thanks to Orange who were very eager to retain my business considering the deal they did for me! Whatever, the lack of a flash on the phone's camera nearly stopped me going for it! What has the world come to, it's a phone for god's sake and I nearly made the decision based on the phone's flash, interesting. However, what it does illustrate is the ever escalating list of features on all sorts of devices that customers now take for granted meaning it's becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd in an increasingly crowded market space, whatever the electronic device happens to be.

The phone part I now take for granted, but previously I've chosen a phone on size, looks, bluetooth, voice-based dialling, but now it's the phone's flash capability! What I've always wanted and am now able to just about get in the Touch HD is a single device that meets all my mobile needs: Phone, SMS, Email both Exchange and POP3 based, MP3 player, Camera, Video player, 3G web access and Bluetooth. By today's standards not an exceptional list, but thinking back to my Nokia 8310 which I chose simply on the size of it my expectations were a whole lot lower.

Even with all these features though, I'm still not content. Having played with the Touch HD for a week now, there are many things I think could be done to improve the phone and for the most part it's in the Touch HD Flo 3D interface where further work would have improved the experience. For instance, I love being able to flick through my SMS messages and watch them flow on and off the screen in high-res, but to send a text, I have to drop back in to the clunky windows interface. Grr. The MP3 player won't let me easily flick through my albums, instead I have to flick track by track unless I go to the specific Album list. Again, Grr. That's just two little niggles (there are others) where the interface lets itself down where a bit more effort from the programmers would have greatly enhanced the experience. Even something as simple as setting the Windows interface to match the same black/white/green colours of the Touch HD would have helped!

Anyway, perhaps I'm just being a bit over-demanding, but I can't be the only one. I really feel for the manufacturers, the feature list can't continue to get fatter and fatter, somewhere along the line the emphasis is going to have to change and I'm fairly certain that it'll need to be focussed on quality of the interface rather than anything else and quality is expensive to obtain both in terms of time and money.