Ultimate Friggin' Cellphone (UFC)

Saturday, July 01, 2006

So what's in your dream phone? It's surprising nowadays to find that specs for newer phones aren't what you'd be expecting to find in a cellphone feature list. Let's take a look at a typical feature list from the ever trendy Nokia product line:

Dedicated key for image capture and video record
Six possible capture scene settings including Scenery, Portrait, Night and Sports, Landscape
Flash modes: on, off, automatic and anti red-eye
Advanced camera modes: still, sequence, video
Adjustments: brightness, image quality, self-timer, white balance settings and color tones
2 megapixel camera (1600 x 1200 pixels) with autofocus 20x digital zoom
Integrated flash (operating range up to 1.5m)

Video
Video sharing for one-way live video or video clip sharing within the voice call
Video capturing in MP4 format (MPEG-4 video, AAC-LC audio) CIF resolution (352x288 pixels)
Movie Director for automated video production
Video and still image editors

Nokia XpressPrint Printing Solution
Print digital photos directly from the device:
Transfer photos directly to compatible printer or kiosk via Bluetooth wireless technology, MultiMediaCard (MMC) or to PictBridge-compliant printer via USB connectivity cable
Built-in application is quick and easy to use; no installation, no fuss
Find out more at www.nokia.com/xpressprint

Given a completely objective analysis and without the product's pictures. I'd mistake this ad for a features list of a CAMERA or MP3 player. There's anything BUT actual phone features you'd be using in a call in that list. I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now they'd be including "Dolby Digital 5.1 compatible" or "Complete with can opener" or "For post-menstrual use only" in the phone's specs. Whatever happened to traditional phone features such as signal-to-noise ratio, signal strength, and battery life?

Speaking of battery life, it's strange that nobody finds it disturbing that phones nowadays have a decreasing battery efficiency ratio for every new model that comes out. Nobody ever mentions that since pfft, who needs batteries when you have webcam, internet, a camera, a camcorder, an mp3 player, and a fully-operational dildo for a phone? Ever noticed Nokia and other phone manufacturers have stopped mentioning battery life and talk times in their main features lists?

That means for all the "advancement" in phone technology, people are still f'ing hard to contact because more often than not, they end up with dead batteries because their phone is being used for almost anything save for transportation and life support (newer models may feature this soon so the situation looks bleak) .

In the information technology field, critical systems that should always be available are made as indepenedent to other systems and as reliable as possible. That means they have their own power supply, own connection, own machine and in some cases their own rooms and buildings, pretty much like VIPs . I think phones should be treated the same way given their important usages, because I hate it when I can't prank call people by telling them their pets are dead when their phones are off.

Now I'm not saying adding features to the phone is a bad thing. Cameras are always handy to have around since you'll never know when somebody does something so stupid, immortalizing it as a JPEG/DIVX file circulated all over the net would be a favor to humanity. Voice recorders are the best tools for blackmail too. I'm sure you can see the benefits now.

Even with advanatages, I just think some phones are already going overboard. Take for example the "hardcore mp3 player" N80 phone. It has a 4 gigabyte hard disk tacked onto the phone. Hard disks, from a technical point of view, are resource mongers, eating both processor time and power (since a hard disk has a motor that needs constant spinning) - that requirement goes against phone reliability. Other phones have their own "graphics processing chip" a chip usually found in home PCs and gaming consoles that help the main computer inside the phone to process images. Once again, it's nothing but power drain for your phone.

But it's not like the trend will be changing any sooner. Just remember this simple formula when youre buying a phone:

Battery Life divided by Number of Features = Chances of your phone being available when youre being raped in the ass and you need to call the police.

As for me? I've always been looking for just one feature for my dream phone. An oven toaster. Because , man, who the hell doesnt want to be able to talk and eat toast at the same time anywhere anytime? That would rule. Screw battery life. If you have this kind of phone, chicks will be all over you like flies on a pile of fresh dogshit. You don't need battery life anymore after that. Just thinking about having a phone like that is giving me a hardon. Marketing should start listening more to people like me. I think any device that has an oven toaster attached to it will be selling more. More than those tacky iPod pieces of sh*t (I'll reserve that topic for another post)

Damn all this talk about toast has gotten me hungry. I think I'll call in a delivery using my phone, because that' s about as close to making toast it can do for me as of now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your post reminded me of this article: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/New_%22voice_chat%22_feature_proposed_for_mobile_phones

Amen to all that you've said. Even the toaster. ^_~

Anonymous said...

Err... the link to the article didn't show up in its full glory. XD

LINX0RZ

 

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