Mobile Phones Suck... But Isn't It Amazing That They Exist?
from the everything's-amazing-and-nobody's-happy dept
By now, hopefully, you've seen that clip of comedian Louis CK on Conan O'Brien's show (the old, old one) which went kinda viral, where Louis talks about how "everything is amazing and no one is happy":When I was a kid in the 1960s and we came back from a visit to my grandmother's, my mother used to call my grandmother, let the phone ring twice, and then hang up. It was important for my grandmother to know that we'd arrived home safely, but long-distance telephone calls were too expensive to indulge in unnecessarily. When I entered Vanderbilt University in 1971, my parents had to decide whether to pay for a telephone in my dorm room. They decided to do so, but most of the thoroughly upper-middle-class students on my floor did not have phones. Phones cost real money back then. Then came the breakup of the AT&T monopoly in 1984. Phone technology and competitive service provision exploded. In 1982, Motorola produced the first portable mobile phone. It weighed about 2 pounds and cost $3995. Within a very few years they were much smaller, much cheaper, and selling like hotcakes.But the point of the post is to question why some are now putting together an event about "Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible," pointing out that it's a bit silly to complain when you compare it to what we had.
Today there are some 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, and counting, or about 67 per every 100 people in the world. The newer ones allow you to carry in your hand more computing power than the computers that put Apollo 11 on the moon. You can cruise the internet, find your location with GPS, read books, send texts, pay bills, process credit cards, watch video, record video, stream video to the web, take and send photos -- oh, and make phone calls from just about anywhere. Unimaginable just a few years ago.
It's a really good point -- but I have to admit I can see both sides to this argument. It's the very fact that, even when we do amazing things, we can still see the faults with it and that drives us to keep improving and to keep innovating. It's the very "culture of improvement" that drives growth and innovation. So, while I can agree that it's sometimes a shame how much we feel a sense of entitlement towards making things better when those amazing things didn't even exist just a few years ago, it's hard not to sympathize with the feeling of wanting things to be even better.
And, by the way, I'm not alone in seeing both sides of all this. That Louis CK video at the top? The one where he mocks the guy sitting next to him on an airplane for getting upset that the WiFi in the sky suddenly stopped working? Yeah, he later admitted that it wasn't someone sitting next to him, but himself getting pissed off at the WiFi not working, even though he didn't even know in-flight WiFi existed until he got on the airplane. So yes, everything is amazing, and no one's happy... but maybe that's a good thing.
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Filed Under: cell phones, complaining, louis ck, mobile
Reader Comments
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WHY CAN'T I BLACKLIST CALLERS?
I mean, like, if caller ID shows (555)555-1234, DO NOTHING. Don't ring, don't flash, just damn IGNORE it, for Christ's sake! How hard it is to implement?
Yet, 9 years and counting, I'm still yet to see a phone with this feature.
Another big thing: My damn phone has 8GB of RAM, yet it can't keep more than 100 SMSes? How ridiculous is THAT?
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Just drop them, or send them to voicemail? Send an auto response? Fake ring and ring for the caller but nothing for me?
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Re: blacklist callers
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Oh, but you can! (Droid Does)
The SMS thing is ridiculous. Get a new phone.
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Re: Oh, but you can! (Droid Does)
I wrote the same sort of app up for my blackberry using their SDK. Its a wonderful thing to have an "ignore this freak" (This Call, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, forever) option on the phone. Next is to tie it into the calendar next so the phone doesnt ring during meetings unless they are on a specific list-group.
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Re: Oh, but you can! (Droid Does)
Most modern smart phones will store texts on the phone without asking, but others use the SIM by default.
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There are also apps for the iPhone that can do blacklists. Also, you're phone doesn't have 8GB of RAM, it has 8GB of storage, and you might want to check to see if it's saving your texts on the phone's internal memory or if its saving it to an SD card.
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www.terrafugia.com
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Level of Service expectations
We traded more features for a 3rd world level of reliability.
That's just the simple fact of the matter.
A lot of people simply don't want to admit that the princess has some very ugly warts.
There are some things that a wireless network isn't reliable enough for and many of us still employ wired networks for this reason. Some of us even go so far as to equip our homes with proper wired networking.
We shouldn't kid ourselves when we decide to make certain compromises.
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What's more amazing is that they only use a small portion of bandwidth yet they can service so many people. Imagine if we allocated more bandwidth to allowing people to request content, like Internet radio stations that anyone can set up, and listen to said content instead of just having one huge broadcasting spectrum that serves a large area. We can break up station requests into small cells, like cell phones, where each person can request an online station that anyone can set up (ie: like with blogs) and upon requesting it the signal will then be transmitted for said station in a particular area. This can enable far more radio and television stations being that multicasting technology within various regions can be used to ensure that unused stations do not get broadcasted in areas they are not used hence freeing up all that bandwidth in those areas for other things. After all, cell phones broadcast signals that get translated into sound and if they can service so many people using up a small fraction of the bandwidth why not substantially extend the available radio stations by allowing any device to choose what it wants to listen to.
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mobile phones suck
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And ultimately comes the thing that people are no happier, despite having all these new things. Life just goes faster. We're more productive, we achieve new things that weren't possible before, but we are no happier.
I'm not suggesting that we need to go back to how it was before we had all the things we do - but we need to have a little perspective on how amazing it all is. And just take a breather and calm down when something doesn't work and accept it for a moment, rather than spend the next three hours on the phone screaming at successive customer service agents on helpline numbers until it is fixed. That's counterproductive.
And once in a while, turn your cell phone off. Turn the computer off. Go outside and go for a walk. It's good for you!
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Not the way you described it. ;-)
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I'm afraid I have trouble sympathizing with always 'wanting things to be even better'. It might drive innovation, though I doubt it is essential to it, but whether it does or not, it's pretty depressing.
I don't see the issue just as a 'sense of entitlement'. There is also a deep, apparently inborn desire to complain about absolutely everything.
An acquaintance of mine was recently asked for money by a panhandler. She had no cash, but she was carrying a tray of cookies that she had made for an office party, and asked the guy if he wanted a couple of these instead. His haughty response: "Are the fresh?"
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I Registered To Say This
Sure. Some people are brats. But the same capitalism you laud so highly forces people to pay high rates regardless of the excellent technology we develop to make things cheaply.
That is the real reason people are pissed.
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The Value Of The Slate Event
Looking at the speaker list, they neglected to get anyone whose credentials would indicate they know anything about mobile phones, mobile data services, nor mobile networks.
Sounds like a low-value discussion. Kinda the inverse of the discussions congresspeople organize where only the industry is present, and then talk about how perfect they are.
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Re: The Value Of The Slate Event
I tended to agree with the logic, economics, and facts represented by all of them, except some of the wilder claims by Sascha Meinrath. His assertion that the USA has worse cellular service than the rest of the world, and is getting worse is backwards. In 2000, we were perhaps 4 years behind the RoW, where now, we are close to the lead in many ways: WiMAX, LTE, cutting edge phones, tablets, mobile OS, apps.
We're in the front of the peleton in wireless, where we trail the pack in fixed broadband.
I stand behind my comment that they need to have at least one or two mobile telecom experts (and someone to rep the carrier side) on the panel as well as these policy wonks.
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This is really simple
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1971-14.00 phone bill
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1971-14.00 phone bill
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Now I spend $140/month for my wife and myself for cell phones, $70/month for dish, $35/month for local phone, $25/month for DSL, and about $10/month for misc long distance. That comes to, let's see $280/month, or $3,360 per year. I watch tv, but most of it stinks, I can read the newspaper without getting my hands dirty, and, oh, yeah, I can send a low-resolution picture from my phone to my desktop (although I have a camera that does the same thing with better quality). And, yes, I can get messages or make calls from anywhere, most of which could certainly have waited till I got home and poured myself a nice pommard.
I'm sorry, why am I doing this?
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In comparison, I pay about $80/month for my family's two cell phones, which both can make long distance calls, access the internet, take pictures and do a multitude of things that you 1970s phone could not, for about the same price. I still get TV for free OTA, and get the same 5 channels that occasionally show something decent.
Advances in technology almost always drive the price of the base technology down. However, the advances in technology also leave lots of shiny things behind for people to buy for far more than they used to spend. For those who want to keep just the basic functionality though, I would say costs have been driven down by the overabundance of extras that companies can use to pad their bottom lines.
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thank
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thank
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Cell phones are garbage
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What's amazing is...
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