What mobile buyers want

<![CDATA[Research firm NPD Group, according to an AlwaysOn posting, will be looking for the following features in a new mobile handset during the coming year:

Longer Battery Life. Yes, I got rid of a Treo 300 because I couldn’t replace the battery. But I want longer life in the replaceable battery, which is what the new Treo 650 offers as a solution: Carry multiple batteries. No, I want a phone that gets me through the day. What I went with was the Samsung MM-A700, because it combined the other features I was looking for with solid battery life.

Caller ID. Who doesn’t use caller ID? Linking it to the address book, so I can see who is calling is the critical caller ID feature. Vanilla Caller ID is only confusing, because you stand there thinking “Who do I know in North Carolina?” or “Where is the 907 area code?”

Changeable Ringtone. I can’t figure out how to change my ringtones, but I changed them once and they are embarrassing. However, I would not pay $1.95 to have a particular song as my ringtone for six weeks. A few more ringtones to choose from would be nice, but ease of use is most important to me. I understand the Samsung supports MP3 ringtones, but I am more concerned about the signal quality on the Sprint network.

Color Screen. Dude, the color is important, but it’s not like its HDTV. The Samsung promises streaming TV and gives me pixelated 10- or 12-frame-per-second clips that I have to wait for. Eccch. I don’t think I’ll ever watch TV on my phone, but then I also thought I’d never want to take a picture with my phone, either.

Voice-Activated Dialing. I suppose it’s nice to have voice-activated dialing, but I remember screaming at the Wildfire audio assistant whenever I called from a car because of the background noise interfering with the voice recognition features. This is an Apple Newton kind of feature that, if it promises voice activation and provides it only 80 percent of the time, will only disappoint. I still haven’t activated this feature of the Samsung phone.

Built-In Camera. I am both impressed by the quality of the Samsung camera and the phone phun to be had with it. It takes fairly high quality movies—looks like about 18 fps and the audio ain’t bad. I often have a camera with me in the car, but it’s never as easily accessible as my phone, which is always in my pocket.

SMS. I’m old. I call people when I want to get a message through, even though I live on email. In Korea, only the nearly dead send email. I’ve sent about 10 SMS messages, ever, and no one responded. What can I say? My friends are old, too.

Email. You need a full-sized keyboard to send email. This is a writer thing. The Treo was painful. If I was trapped in a car underwater and there wasn’t enough air to make a phone call, then I might send email from my phone. I do mail pictures from my phone, which seems like a great combination of immediacy and the rich media capabilities of my phone.

Internet Access (only 28 percent of buyers say they want it). I use this, particularly when I want to keep up on something that’s going on, like a ballgame, an election, or a particular news story. I believe that a close survey of usage of Net access on a mobile would find it is spiky and related very closely to breaking events, rather than habitual usage.

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PDA Features (only 18 percent). This is highly over-rated by phone designers. An address book is a feature of a phone—in the deskset phone world it’s called “speed dial.” Every other feature of a PDA is of little use, because navigation and screen geometry make them more work to use than carrying notes on paper or in a real PDA or laptop. I use my brain and laptop to keep my schedule.]]>