Worst of the Week: The boogaloo review

Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
With just weeks to go before the end of 2009, and for many not a moment too soon, we thought we’d take this time to look back at the past year and list a few lowlights that really stuck in our craw, and give it the sweet title of “Worst of the Week Year in Review: Electric Boogaloo!” (Sort of rolls off the tongue, don’t it?)
So, in no chronological order or order of importance we present WOTWTIR: EB!
1. Maps! Seriously, what is the wireless industry’s fascination with maps? I think we are all aware that maps have been around for a few thousand years, and at least 20 years in the wireless industry, but it seems like you could not throw a midget in 2009 without hitting a map touting wireless coverage.
Now, I may be a little jealous of this because I have always considered myself a bit of an amateur geography buff – as opposed to those professional geography buffs that sold out to the Man – and see this maps infatuation as an invasion into this secret world of loners and misfits. What happened to the good old days when it didn’t matter exactly how extensive wireless coverage was and that carriers provided the smallest possible maps that were just blanketed with different coverage corresponding to possible wireless coverage depending on day or the week or direction of wind. 2009 is going down for me as the year maps lost their fun.
2. Boring phone designs. I know Apple’s iPhone brought about a revolution in the user interface of the cellphone market, but to consider its design attractive is a bit of a stretch. It’s just a rectangular slab with glass on one side and plastic on the other. It makes any Motorola iDEN phone look like it was designed by Michelangelo.
While the iPhone’s UI has forced competitors to step it up in terms of creating an interface that is easy to use, it also apparently took away all originality when it comes to handset design. Even Nokia, the industry leader in ridiculous handset design, has tempered its Nordic craziness and is bringing out phones that have a not-too-subtle likeness to the iPhone slab. As I type this, I have a handful of demo devices recently sent to me and at a quick glance they all appear to be the same phone.
I can only hope that with the next iteration of the iPhone, Apple does the industry a favor and changes up the design so that three years after it comes out everyone else in the industry will have been able to copy it.
(And while on the topic of boring phone design, can someone please figure out a better place to put buttons on big-screened devices. Right now, all of the volume, camera and sleep buttons are on the sides of these devices. You know, the only part of the phone that you can actually grab to pick up. So every time I pick up one of these devices to marvel at the gorgeous displays I end up either changing the volume setting, launching the camera or better yet, putting the phone to sleep. Brilliant!)
3. 4G. I hate being “that guy,” but my mind cramped every time I saw the term 4G in 2009, especially when it was used to describe WiMAX or LTE technologies. I don’t know how many times I wrote some sort of disclaimer in a story talking about “4G” explaining that there really is no such thing at this point as 4G and that even the standards that are being talked about to describe 4G are not expected to be met by current WiMAX or LTE standards. At best, the next evolution of these standards will meet the so-called 4G threshold being bounced around by the overlords at the ITU.
But, that didn’t stop nearly every marketing machine in the industry from using the 4G term to describe just about anything LTE or WiMAX related. (Sprint Nextel should get a lion’s share of the blame for this as they are using the 4G term in consumer advertising for its WiMAX service. I know Sprint Nextel is in a place where it needs to take advantage of anything it offers to turn around its sagging fortunes, but this is a short-sighted decision that will likely only cause long-term suffering for me. And that’s what this is really about. Me.)
Of course, the use of 4G is probably better than throwing some decimal point on the end of 3G to describe these networks. The last thing the world – and by that I mean me – needs is more numbers to describe wireless technologies.
I think the only solution for this is to mandate that anyone deploying WiMAX or LTE in their current versions be forced to refer to the technology as 3G Turbo: Electric Boogaloo! (Never gets old.)
OK, enough of that. Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–Sorry to see Nokia changing its North American retail focus away from its branded stores to big-box retailers like everyone else has done. While I did not think the branded store concept was a smart one in terms of actually selling devices, it was at least unique in a market increasingly losing its uniqueness. I remember visiting one of the first branded outlets in Las Vegas during a trade show and being both impressed by its layout and focus on design as well as confused that you could not actually buy a device there. At least it was different.
–Hard to believe it has taken this long, but word from AT&T execs this week seem to indicate the carrier is finally getting around to introducing tiered pricing plans for its data packages, specifically those for the iPhone. This has been a hot topic since the beginning of wireless data with carriers fluctuating between offering flat-rate plans for simplicity and tiered plans to actually charge people for what they use. I think the tiered approach might be the long-term solution, though carriers need to be careful how they implement it. Since no one has any clue what a kilo-, mega- or gigabyte really translates into when using data services, carriers need to make sure customers are constantly updated on how much data each Web page or streamed video consumes and how much of their “bucket” remains. This needs to be done with on the screen of the device and in real time. Otherwise, anarchy will reign. And I mean the real kind, with human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria!
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@ardenmediaco.com.