Assignment 6 (Pete Hunt)

Over the past few days, I carefully observed my cell phone usage and noticed a lot of inconveniences. First of all, I should point out that I do not have a very good cell phone. In fact, it is one of the basic Verizon models. The first thing I noticed was that the text message feature was used a lot. My phone does not organize text messages in threaded conversations, like many smartphones do. This is a definite improvement that has already been made, and just needs to percolate down to the lesser models.

One other thing I noticed was that my fingers got tired after texting for extended periods of time. This is a function of the limits of the device. Perhaps a better system than T9 could be devised, perhaps one that takes the context of the conversation into account and predicts what words you are going to type, so you don’t need to fully type them all the way out.

Finally, several student organizations I am in utilize mass texting features. I would prefer a unified calendar interface where they can push updates to me and I am constantly notified of my commitments from one source, rather than dealing with multiplexed streams of data which is distracting and makes it difficult to concentrate on other communications I may be making.

Overall, the design of my cellphone was fantastic for what it was originally intended to do: make simple phone calls. With the advent of text messaging, however, the design of the phone needed to radically change. I believe this is what BlackBerry and Apple did with their smartphone offerings, and I think that proletariat cellphones need to adopt some of these design changes as well.