On the way to work one fine morning, I stopped at a road accident scene, with some rather traumatic injuries – I thought someone had died, but instead of being dead, that someone spoke to me and asked me to phone a family member, telling me the number. So I thought I would do that.\u00a0 At that point, I whipped out my trusty touch screen phone, and … well it was obscenely difficult:<\/p>\n
These things are not difficult, but under pressure, it is easy to make mistakes, and mistakes cost time on smart phones.\u00a0 It was surreal – the visibly injured person had a better handle on the situation than the man trying to make a simple phone call.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t much better when I dialed 112<\/strong> (the emergency number) for the ambulance – the phone was just sluggish.\u00a0 Apart from hanging up by mistake in the middle of the call, I was on hold, and needed the phone to take pictures (someone was culpable and needed to be nailed), but I couldn’t because things don’t work like that.<\/p>\n I realised something: in an emergency, I want a phone, not a smartphone.\u00a0 The device is a great GPS navigator, a wonderful game console, and awesome music player, a capable camera and video recorder, a good standby web browser, but for the one thing it occasionally needs to do fast, it is useless.<\/p>\n There’s a Dilbert comic about the superiority of Unix “Here’s a nickel kid get yourself a better computer”<\/a>.\u00a0 I need buttons, and a straightforward one-function interface.<\/p>\n In unrelated news, I’ve lost it.\u00a0 It’s gone.\u00a0 I think the kids hid it, hoping to play games on it later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the way to work one fine morning, I stopped at a road accident scene, with some rather traumatic injuries – I thought someone had died, but instead of being dead, that someone spoke to me and asked me to … Continue reading