Making sense of smartphones a complicated task

NET RESULTS:A COLLEAGUE at another newspaper recently complained on Twitter than Nokia's new N97 touchscreen smartphone came with a 70-page manual. Why, he asked, did a handset need a manual?, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

He has a point. The laws of good device usability should dictate that a device be intuitive and logical, with how to do something inherent in the menu system and the graphical user interface, or GUI (tech speak for how the device presents itself to you, the user, via its screen).

For a touchscreen phone, this is especially important as this way of accessing a phone is intuitive – much easier to touch what we want than to scroll and click – but less familiar, because it is a relatively new way for people to use their mobile handsets.

Thus there’s a learning curve. But the learning curve can and should take advantage of our natural human affinity for using direct touch, rather than having an intermediary step of a physical interface of scrolling devices and buttons.

The champion of this desirable, highly intuitive approach and the rival Nokia has in its crosshairs with the N97, is Apple and its iPhone.

I’ve used both. My fledging use of the N97 this past week confirmed that the iPhone still has the hands-down advantage on intuitive touchscreen interfaces.

Most of what you want to do with an iPhone you can figure out just by looking at the device and trying the most obvious thing that comes to mind.

When I was test-driving an iPhone, I tried this out on a lot of people, including a 10-year-old. I just handed them the iPhone with an invitation to play with it and “figure it out for yourself”.

Needless to say, the 10-year-old was better than the grown-ups, but generally it was pretty simple to get the basics.

By contrast, I couldn’t even figure out immediately how to answer my ringing N97 (I thought I could press the screen but you have to swipe the screen and, although it also has an option to unlock the device when it rings, you don’t have to . . . So why flash the option on a call then?).

But there are things I really like about the N97, including the physical qwerty keyboard, which I prefer to tapping out text messages.

But back to manuals. The reason the N97’s manual is there is because people need a manual, especially for highly complex, highly functional smartphones that are more mini-computers than enhanced handsets. I also needed one for the iPhone’s more detailed functions.

Indeed I have always needed one because handsets are one of those gadgets that regularly baffle me. Hence I don’t change them often.

One of the things people who are adept at mobile use forget is that most of the world doesn’t have the same familiarity with a range of devices and formats and functions.

Studies regularly confirm this. One US survey of 150,000 people by the NPD Group out at the start of this year found that only 20 per cent of people used their phones as full multimedia devices.

Some 28 per cent of people didn’t know if they could watch videos; 23 per cent weren’t aware if their phone had GPS (global satellite positioning) capability; 21 per cent didn’t know if their phone could play music and 34 per cent didn’t know if they could add extra memory.

Most handsets do have most or all of these features.

Another study this year of 4,000 UK and US mobile users by Mformation found that 85 per cent found setting up a new phone challenging, with 61 per cent saying it was as much a hassle as changing bank accounts.

Some 95 per cent of users said they would use more services if they could figure out how to use the features on their phone (operators, take note).

The proliferation of mobile operating systems adds to the complexity, according to industry analysts.

In the PC world, about 95 per cent of people choose between just two operating systems – PCs or Macs – with a smaller subset going for Linux.

By contrast, mobiles around the world are powered by dozens of handset operating systems, making for little consistency in how functions, applications and services are accessed by the user.

Bankers Goldman Sachs said in a detailed client note this week that the N97 was plagued by this very problem.

The need for a manual, in other words, is due to a lax approach by Nokia to updating the Symbian 60 operating system on which the device runs, making operations overly complex. That will take time to overhaul.

On the other hand, many, like me, will like a hybrid touchscreen/ keyboard option.

Still, such issues leave the giant handset maker under heavy performance pressure, with Goldman projecting a slippage in Nokia’s market share for smartphones over the next 18 months (it currently owns 55 per cent of that segment).

More consoling for the Finnish giant is that Goldman also predicts Nokia’s sheer scale and strength in intellectual property will put it back as the frontrunner for high-end devices within three years.

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