Taking the mobile back to its functional retro basics

Net Results: Every time I visit my parents in California, I get a regular request: set this or change that on my mother's mobile phone.

This is a phone that almost never gets used because, with all its buttons, settings, and whiz bang features, it is too confusing to my folks to be used regularly for calls. So they mostly keep it sitting in its charger on the kitchen counter and, on rare occasions like a road trip, it goes into a handbag where it might be used once or twice (as hotel calls are expensive).

A sign of how little the phone is used is that I don't even know the number. There's no point in knowing the number, as 98 per cent of the time that phone is on the counter about five feet away from the landline. So if I need to reach my parents, I ring the landline. When they are travelling, I just don't talk to them until they get back.

Needless to say I think this state of affairs is ludicrous. A phone would be useful to both my parents during the day, when one or the other is out of the house and needs to check some detail (a shopping list, the time for dinner, whether they have anything on for a given day).

But there it sits, unused in its little holder, kept "for emergencies". No wonder then that figures from analyst Forrester Research show that mobile phone penetration among people over 65 is only about 50 per cent.

My guess is that those complex menu schemes, multi-use buttons and extras my parents and their friends do not want - MP3 players, cameras, calendars, PC syncing, games, e-mail access, chat functions - keep them relying on the landline.

Not that the rest of us over, say, 35 necessarily want all that stuff either. But my parents (and grandparents) are a generation for whom the benefits of having a mobile do not yet outweigh the confusions of operating one.

I will be the first to admit that I am a sad geek wannabe and never use three-fourths of the features on my phone.

I do like the cameras, however. Those I use regularly and they are lots of fun. And when I used an XDA for a couple of years - the combination handheld PC/smartphone device - I used e-mail all the time. When travelling, I found it very useful to have the internet connection too.

But at the moment, I am back using a handy little mobile as a bit of a change - and with the mobile and its weeny screen, give me basic functionality any day. Except you cannot have basic functionality. And even the most basic functions can be hard to figure out.

Take locking the keypad, for example. Yes, I know now that there is a standard combination of two keys that locks and unlocks keypads, but because I had been using an XDA, I did not know what this was.

Did my Nokia phone include this information anywhere in the manual? No. Anywhere in the menu guide on the phone? No, not that I could find.

Finally, someone about 13 years old put me out of my misery and showed me what to do. For the rest of the day I felt like Methusalah.

So I was delighted to see that Vodafone is introducing a new phone/tariff combination it is calling "Simply". It is what it says on the label - very basic phones with very basic service. There are two basic Sagem phones that let you make calls or text, and have an address book. There are only three keys that act as shortcuts. There is no complex menu set-up.

The service was launched this week in Britain and five other countries. A Vodafone spokeswoman said the offering would be available in the Republic as well, probably around the end of summer.

She noted that this was primarily targeting the older user who finds mobiles confusing. But I think the company may well find its user-base for such a service will push down into the 40- and 30-somethings as well. Personally, I am becoming more inclined to want a small simple phone for doing phone things, and a handheld for doing all the rest.

I was interested to see some other technophiles apparently feel the same.

One person who posted on the gadget site Engadget.com about the Simply offering wrote: "I know a lot of people - including myself, and not the proverbial grandmothers - who despise the gadgety feature creep of mobile phones.

"A simple phonebook, preferably easy to sync with Outlook or Palm, good reception and battery life, sturdy construction, a good numeric keypad, and that's it. No colour screen, no games, no camera, no garlic press."

Surprise: retro non-functionality may have curiously broad appeal after all.

klillington@irish-times.ie

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