Why is cell phone software still so primitive?
- by Tomislav Nakic-Alfirevic
I don't do mobile development, but it strikes me as odd that features like this aren't available by default on most phones:
full text search: searches all address book contents, messages, anything else being a plus
better call management: e.g. a rotating audio call log, meaning you always have the last N calls recorded for your listening pleasure later (your little girl just said her first "da-da" while you were on a business trip, you had a telephone job interview, you received complex instructions to do something etc.)
bluetooth remote control (like e.g. anyRemote, but available by default on a bluetooth phone)
no multitasking capabilities worth mentioning
and in general no e.g. weekly software updates, making the phone much more usable (even if it had to be done over USB, rather than over the network). I'm sure I was dumbfounded by the lack or design of other features as well, but they don't come to mind right now.
To clarify, I'm not talking about smartphones here: my plain, 2-year old phone has a CPU an order of magnitude faster than my first PC, about as much storage space and it's ridiculous how bad (slow, unwieldy) the software is and it's not one phone or one manufacturer.
What keeps the (to me) obvious software functionality vacuum on a capable hardware platform from being filled up?
Edit:
I believe a clarification on the multitasking point might be beneficial. I'll use my phone as an example, although the point is much more general. The phone can multitask and in fact does: you can listen to music and do something else at the same time. On the other hand, the way the software has been designed makes multitasking next to useless. (Ditto with the external touch screen: it can take touch commands, but only one application makes use of it, and only with 3 commands.) To take the multitasking example to the extreme, if I plug my phone into my laptop and it registers as an external disk, it doesn't allow any kind of operation: messages, calling, calendar, everything out of reach, although I can receive a call. No "battery life" issue there: it's charging while connected.
BTW, another example of design below the current state of the art: I don't see a phone on the horizon which will remember where in an audio or video file you were when you stopped listening/watching it last time (podcasts are a good use case). Simplistic rewind/fast forward functionality only aggravates the problem.
