So a couple of weeks ago I had my phone stolen which was an absolute pain.
Given I was about to catch a flight to Australia, I bought a cheapo Samsung at the airport to ‘tied me over’ … however the thing was so horrendous [and I mean HORRENDOUS] that as soon as I got home, I immediately re-charged an old SONY Ericsson I had lying about and started using that instead.
Anyway all that changed when last Friday the new SONY Ericsson 5 megapixal Cybershot phone was released, the K850i.
Apart from the fact I love SE phones [and not because SONY are a client of mine] I had been waiting for this model for ages and was going to get it even if my old phone hadn’t been nicked.
So off I went to the shop [who had literally just taken delivery of the phone] and handed over a massive wedge to get one of them in my filthy little hands.
Look, it’s amazing … 3G, 5 megapixel camera, email, hell it even makes calls … however they have made are 3 little design flaws that makes the user experience so painful that I’ve decided to get rid of it, despite 6 months of slavering over it!
What am I going on about? Well basically, it’s the keyboard.
Yes, the keyboard.
Have a look at it …
Can you see what I mean?
Well if you can’t, let me enlighten you.
1 Look how small those buttons are … meaning half the time your fingers fall into the gaps between the digits rather than on the numbers themselves.
2 Look how some of the buttons are not in a straight line [especially numbers 2 and 5] … it might not seem much, but it makes texting and dialling far more difficult than you’d imagine.
3 Look at how the navigation button covers some of the numbers – it means you sometimes hit that instead of the numbers 5 or 8 which buggers up dialling and texting.
Now I appreciate these might not sound much, but when you use the phone as much as me [not to mention write alot of emails on the thing] it is bloody frustrating and what makes it worse is that apart from ruining a great phone, it seems to have been done more for more ‘aesthetic reasons’ than anything practical.
Come on SONY Ericsson, didn’t you test this out with real users?
Don’t tell me, you thought people who would buy this phone would mainly use it for the camera than for texting – well frankly that’s a crap excuse [plus it makes a mockery of ‘convergence] and has resulted in one of your most loyal customers looking to Nokia for his next phone because quite frankly you’ve forgotten how many mobile users have/need a tactile relationship with their device.
My advice is you learn from NOKIA’s mistake … because when they tried to recreate the mobile number interface it turned out to be a fucking disaster and caused many people to question their ‘HUMAN TECHNOLOGY’ philosophy.
Look, I’m all for experimentation but sometimes it is braver to NOT do something even if you think it makes you look cooler.
If … and it’s a big if … you get the keypad right on the K850i version 2, then you might get me back as a customer, but until then, I’ll be walking away and you only have yourselves to blame.
For Andy: The photo in the picture is NOT my phone – so don’t give me any shit about it being green because mine’s actually blue! So there 🙂