If there was ever a case for simplified phones, this is it. WDSGlobal surveyed 500 mobile users and found that only 20% of the features were regularly used and a whole 25% were entirely undiscovered.
“For the most part, users struggled to list more than half a dozen services featured on their current mobile phone. Regular usage was largely confined to voice, text messaging, address book, camera and alarm clock. Users do dip into additional services, such as the music player, Internet and games, but we found that a large proportion of features remained completely undiscovered,” says Doug Overton, vice president of consulting and analysis at WDSGlobal. Service discovery, the company suggests, is now one of the most challenging barriers to mobile service adoption.
You can see why less means more for the majority of phone users, and why something like the iPhone, with its highly discoverable applications, is so popular. One would hope that Android’s rich software marketplace will do more than just throw a bunch of third-party fruits of labour into a giant pile and let the end users sort them out, but will provide a clean and enjoyable portal for that 25% of applications that never see the light of day.
