• Redundant Features in Mobile Phones

    Redundant Features in Mobile Phones

    Prasad Naik, Nov 13, 2009 1334 hrs IST

    Features that nobody wants/needs/cares

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Have you ever come across a feature in your mobile phone and wondered why its creator thought of something so useless that most people would hardly care about? We sure have felt like that about certain features and today we bring you a list of such features that we think nobody would ever want/need and would care less if it was removed from their phones.  


Massive User Manuals/Software CDs 


What do you see when you open the box of your brand new phone? Well, the phone of course, but other than the phone and its accessories lies a huge bundle of user manuals, some of them so thick that the user may not give it a second look.

Some of us do read them, but just once or perhaps twice and after that they are made to serve a life sentence inside the phone's box, never to see the light of day again. So what is the point of chopping all those trees and making these manuals if they are hardly going to be used?

Manufacturers should realized this by now and provide only a small quick start guide and provide the rest in the form of a PDF, either on the company website or on the phone's memory itself. Apple, for example, does this. However, the rest of them provide enough manuals in one box to make you wonder how many forests were cleared to make them!  The same goes for software CDs that you get with the phones. They would hardly ever get used more than once, after which they just contribute to the e-waste of our planet. Can't the software just be provided on the memory of the phone itself, so that when you connect the phone to the PC, the software will be installed automatically?   



 


 


Proprietary ports


Standards such as miniUSB or microUSB have been available for quite sometime. For audio there is the 3.5mm jack. Yet manufacturers think it is a brilliant idea to provide proprietary ports, which restricts a user to cables and accessories that are exclusive to the device instead of just plugging in any old USB cable or headphones and getting the job done with minimum fuss. Nokia had been pushing its Pop-Port for quite sometime, until they eventually saw the light and adopted microUSB and 3.5mm audio jack a while back. Samsung is following suit. Sony Ericsson, LG and others are still in the dark in this respect.   



 

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