radioAe6rt

A few days ago I migrated my corporate mobile service to T-Mobile, where I’ll be paying for the service out of personal funds. I was originally planning to add a 4th phone to our family plan at Sprint, but Sprint wanted to bind the 4th phone to a new 2 year contract. That’s when I walked out of the neighborhood Sprint store and took my business somewhere else. That’s right, I was in the store, with my wallet open, and the clerk had my existing family account up on his screen. And I walked out. I hope the Sprint PCS CEO reads this. What does a 2 year contract buy me as a customer again?

At T-Mobile, which carries no negative connotation for me yet, I had visions of a decent mid-range phone, like the Moto RAZR, and the possibility of data plans. But when it came time to check-out, it was not to be. I got a ‘free’ Moto phone, whose most useful feature, aside from making phone calls, is the speakerphone. I’m saddled with, yet again, learning a new user interface for a device that — places phone calls. The proliferation of user interface variations in the mobile industry is just plain insane. The industry goes out of its way to sow this sort of confusion on its customers – going by the name of product differentiation.

Regarding data plans: I”ll pay $5/mo for what I’m expected to pay $20/mo for, but not a penny more. $20/mo is real money – it adds up. Sell 4x as many data subscribers at 1/4 the usual price, will somebody? I use data once in a while, not all day every day.

Of course I should be careful what I wish for, but I’d pay real money $300-$500 for a reliable, open phone with a consistent user interface that I could use with any of the major providers (not the Treo, whose corporate version I just finished using spontaneously reboots at odd times). Is this similar to what the mythical iPhone is supposed to do? Instead, I’m forced to use a piece of junk with a toy UI that does little to reverse my skeptical view of this fragmented industry.

Here’s a final tip for the industry: at least one of the mobile providers should offer a standard user interface on all the phones it resells. Sure you can enable the fancy, flashier user interface if you wish, but offer one interface that users can become accustomed to on all phones the provider offers. That way, when the user’s phone dies in a year or two, they return to buy a new phone that behaves the way the old one did. It’s called abstraction of the UI on top of the phone’s base functionality.

Update 19 jan 2006: I couldn’t agree more with MobHappy regarding the current state of UI’s on mobile phones. I hope whatever the iPhone is, if it is, it will be portable across providers — assuming Apple doesn’t go into the mobile services market itself.

[tags]mobile, mobile data[/tags]