Lets pay tribute to device stupidity. Product managers making decisions that arbitrarily doom a device for use by businesses:
- Nokia Series 40 - Very nice series of programmable phones with many different form factors. Great, highly standardized, Java programmability. Stupidity: Original devices had the system hardwired to allow no bigger than 64K programs! Thats right -- if you want to run one or two large programs instead of four small ones, you are not allowed. The product managers think it better that you have many different toy programs rather than allow one piece of software you really want. Generally, this dooms the very popular platform to the world of games.- Many Motorola iDEN phones - There is no way to turn off T9 mode (the mode that automatically trys to guess words based on single letter key strokes from a phone pad, rather than having to triple type) from a program. So users entering a password must manually change the mode for their text entry fields.
- The Nokia 6230, one of the newest series 40 devices (positive review and negative review) has a nice series 40 camera phone that mysteriously TURNS OFF java access to the camera. This is part of the corporate decision to ENSURE that this phone is never used for business critical applications.
- Siemens ruggedised M65 - Great programmable device, ruggedized even -- should be a great fit for blue collar business users. What is it packaged with? 4 games and a Tamagochi-style Photopet. What are they thinking? Most of my business customers do not want to give their employees phones with games. Why not support a business packaging for this phone?
I'm all in favor of personalizing phone models and creating stylish phones that narrowly target particular market segments. Nonetheless, why make a particular model intentionally dumb? Why build in limitations unrelated to technical limits?
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