Mobile confessions: simplicity and nostalgia

18 April 2007 by Rod McLaren

Interesting post from Marek at MEX yesterday on simple handsets. He writes that colleagues old and young, friends and family all make the same confession to him:

They all want a phone from 7 years ago. It has no camera and it cannot connect to 3G networks. There is no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The screen is black and white and displays 96×65 pixels. The battery lasts for more than a week. Ergonomically, it is typically described as ‘just right’. The phone they all want is the Nokia 6210.

The first and most important learning to take away from this story is that basics matter. Battery life, screen clarity, durability and ease-of-use are the foundations of any great mobile experience.

And this is doubly important because when one of the foundations is missing or poorly executed, that weakest link tends to cheapen and diminish our experience of the others, regardless of how good they are. (For instance, I hear that the Nokia N95 is a great phone but its poor battery life diminishes the whole package. And my BlackBerry 8800 has flimsy side panels that make me feel like it might fall apart.)

Lesson two of the 6210 experience: segmentation is never simple. The 6210 appealed across age groups and market segments. It meant different things to different people in a way that never could have been predicted by Nokia’s market researchers. [...] If it were launched today, the 6210 would most likely appeal to a group of users who price simplicity above all else.

I’m no marketeer, but even though we value simplicity in our phones, I wonder if we buy simplicity? Or are our heads turned by brand, aesthetics, or a stack of features? (Barbara Ballard’s Smart phone evolution and Michael Mace’s The shape of the smartphone and mobile data markets might shed some light on this.) Marek continues:

While that’s probably quite a large group, Nokia could address a much wider range of segments if built 6210-like ease-of-use into a selection of devices offering just one other feature and doing it really well. A 6210 with an integrated MP3 player? A 6210 with a high resolution digital camera?

(But isn’t this how simple products start becoming complicated ones?)

Whilst older handsets were undeniably simpler to an extent (and the Nokia 6210 was undeniably a great phone), I think there’s a third lesson as well: nostalgia plays its part too. We tend to look back at these old, candybar phones, and perhaps the times they represented, with rose-tinted spectacles and forget their annoyances and irritations, certainly as compared to whatever we have today. (I’m no different: I have a long-standing love for the BlackBerry 7700, though whenever I use one these days I’m struck by how slow it runs.) Additionally, I suspect we may remember them as being simpler than they were – because we only remember the 20% of their features that we actually used.

Nonetheless, Marek’s core message seems right: simple-done-well is powerful and is probably under-served currently.

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