The features you have vs. the features you use

12 September 2008

As my own small contribution to the literature on featuritis, here’s a personal illustration. My mobile phone isn’t anything fancy. It’s cheap and very basic by today’s standards. No internet, no camera, no MP3 player. I bought it because all I wanted to do was to make calls and send texts.

So here’s a list of what my “simple” Nokia 1100 can do, and what I actually do with it.

Features that I have:

1. telephone
2. SMS
3. contacts
4. call register
5. choice of ring tones
6. profiles (stored sets of settings)
7. headset jack
8. torch
9. welcome note (customisable message when you switch on)
10. . call diversion
11. . automatic redialling
12. . speed dialling
13. . clock
14. . alarms
15. . reminders
16. . games
17. . calculator
18. . stopwatch
19. . countdown timer
20. . ringtone composer
21. . screensaver

Features that I use:

1. telephone
2. SMS
3. contacts
4. call register
5. clock

Reducing the phone to this very limited feature set, one could dispense with the menu entirely and have a simple toggle between phone and text modes. Even better, work out a way invoking these functions implicitly rather than explicitly.

In its favour, the phone lasts more days on a single battery charge than most fancy smartphones will last hours, as the 74% of Japanese iPhone users that carry it as a second phone (broken link) could probably testify.