Something that is truly bothersome and is a pain is the need to take my battery out or restart the phone whenever new software is downloaded onto my Blackberry Bold. No matter how small the software is, how many times I have downloaded it, or if the software is just a replacement or update, my phone has to be restarted in order to use the device. Over the past two days my phone has been restarted atlease twice due to the installation of new software or drivers. My phone has actually restarted itself once to install software that I did not authorize. To give an idea, some software has been installed includes google latitude, security updates, camera updates, and drivers.
My first idea of resolving this issue with my smart phone is to allow the phone to be like some computers where software can be downloaded without a restart. I would also have a function on the phone that displays what updates need to be installed on my Blackberry so that instead of restarting a couple times a week, I could reduce that to none. I would also like to have a way that if it needs to restart only a portion restarts and I would be able to still tech and use the calling features of the phone while it restarts.
There is numerous social technical gaps. In a preliminary way these ideas could be addressed immediately. These improvements would be easy for the users to support since it will be beneficial and could be fixed with a short visit to a technician and an installation of some drivers. Social-technical gaps would arise with the availability of technicians and availability of technology that could be used to restart certain portions of a cell phone. The changes suggested is "...what we must support socially and what we can support technically...". The error handling that is displayed when my phone turns on and off could be erased or minimized since there would be no real reason to restart the device. This smart phone could truly become a 24/7 device with no faults.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
This is a social technical gap with all phones. I think all people expect their phone's to be like land line phone. They can keep them on all day, for months to years without needing to "restart" it. This is the notion and the social environment that all of us have been brought up in. I actually did not know that phones need to be turned off once every 24 hours at least for a couple of minutes, but who actually does this, or knows this is important for their cell phone to work properly?
ReplyDeleteI have never had a Blackberry so I can't exactly empathize with you, but this definitely seems like a annoying problem especially if the phone decides to restart at an inopportune time.
ReplyDeleteWhat really gets me is the fact that your phone installed and restarted with software that you didn't authorize. Isn't that illegal?
Interesting post, considering the design of cell-phones I hadn't even thought of battery life being an issue before this. I can clearly see however that this is a gap that affects almost everyone with a cell phone. As for software updates, a clean solution for this would be nice. Restarting can be quite a pain and working around that would be an excellent addition to any phone that needs updates.
ReplyDelete