Random Flux

Steve Jobs and everyone else at Apple must sometimes wonder why their competitors make everything so easy for them — it must feel like shooting fish in a barrel. I just updated my cellphone account and got a new Sony Ericsson K800i as part of the deal. Among other things, this phone has full MP3 player capabilities, and since you can insert a memory card with up to 1GB of storage you could theoretically put quite a few songs and podcasts on it.

If only…

What’s wrong with the K800i’s MP3 player?

Unfortunately, Sony clearly didn’t really think about people actually trying to use the phone as an MP3 player. The sound quality is fine but that doesn’t help if you don’t actually use the thing.

• You can only use the headphones supplied with the phone, which have a special proprietary plug. There is no jack for normal headphones. (OK, so the headphones are also a hands-free headset. I don’t care.)
• There is no bookmarking. Although the phone would theoretically be ideal for podcasts and audio books this makes it completely useless. You have to use the < < and >> controls to find your position every time and they work very badly Also, the phone doesn’t support the audible audio book format anyway.
• Transferring tracks to the phone with the Sony software is a little like trying to shell peas while wearing boxing gloves and standing up in a hammock. The software also has what is probably the slowest and worst CD ripper ever created. It is just frighteningly bad.

OK, so I could use a card reader to transfer tracks to the phone directly, that would be relatively easy. But since I listen to podcasts every day and the phone doesn’t bookmark I don’t bother. I still have my iPod Nano with me all the time, because it makes doing everything I want to do so incredibly easy. I just connect the Nano to my computer for 30 seconds every morning before I go to the gym and all my current podcasts load onto it automatically.

What went wrong?

I have a theory about how products like this get made: The management draws up a list of features that the phone is supposed to have and hands it over to the engineers:

Camera? Check. MP3 player? Check. FM Radio? Check. All that matters to them is that the feature is there, so that they can check it off the list and add it to the spec sheet. At no point in the design process does anyone really try to actually use the product in real life, nor do they do any field research to find out how people prefer to use products like this or what they want from them. To companies like these consumers are not people, they are an unknown black hole that is going to absorb products and spit back energy from the event horizon in the form of money in return.

How does Apple do it right?

Apple goes about it differently, and that’s why they succeed. From looking at their products I would guess that first, they look at what people really want to do. Then they sit down a team of designers who try to figure out the best way to enable people to do those things. Finally, they give the design to the engineers and say: Build this!

So why doesn’t anyone else do it like that?

I really don’t know for sure, but I have a suspicion: I think the main problem is that companies who design products like the K800i’s MP3 player really don’t see their customers as people. They think of them as consumers, which is really the same thing as black holes. And because of that they are unable to think of their needs as the needs of real people. So even if they did try to copy the Apple way of working it wouldn’t work, because seeing people as people isn’t something that you can learn.

PS: Apart from this, the K800i is a great phone. The camera is terrific and all the other phone features are very good. It’s just disappointing to have an integrated device that could theoretically do everything you want made useless by poor design decisions.