Mice & Mobiles
I hate Apple Macintosh mice.
A Mac mouse, for those of you who haven’t seen one, has only one button. Indeed, unless it’s a laptop with a touchpad, the whole mouse is the button. A triumph of elegance and simplicity? No. A crime against user input.
My mouse has five buttons, which means that your average Apple Mac user has their data input functionality reduced by some five times when compared to my thoroughly unexceptional pointing device. And that’s assuming we count the mousewheel as a mere ‘button’ when, in fact, it allows copious scrolling up and down, too.
The Apple mouse has all the functionality of the fabled big red button; you can either wipe out humanity in all-encompassing thermonuclear holocaust, or not. With any other type of mouse, you can at the very least right-click on your warheads to adjust their properties, and perhaps even mousewheel through your arsenal’s options to adjust the nature of the destruction of humankind. Then, finally, you use your left button to unleash your highly customised end of the World.
Now that’s control.
The opposite problem is possessed by modern mobile ‘phones.
It is a generally accepted maxim in technology that the more you ask a device to do, the less well it will do each of the things you ask of it. So, when you ask a tiny little plastic box to ring people, text them, connect to the Internet, communicate using IR and Bluetooth, run its own little mini operating system which you can use to play games and run useless applications, and then stick a three megapixel still and video camera in the back, a VGA still/video camera in the front and the whack a hulking great full-colour display bigger than the keypad on it for good measure, what exactly do you expect this product to do well?
Colour displays are crap. You can see a monochrome LCD in all light levels and from almost all angles, but you’re lucky if you can see a colour one from straight on in the dark. So why use them? So you can see the four billion pictures a mini-videos you’ve saved using the stupid built-in camera(s).
I’ve already got two digital cameras both of which will take pictures of infinitely higher quality than a knock-off device which, somewhere in its specification, was intended to contact people using radio waves. So why do I want another couple rammed into my telephone? I don’t.
And these ‘features’ take up so much space that the keypad is too tiny for anyone without a cocktail stick sellotaped to their index finger to dial a number without clumsily dialling a premium rate number in Australia by mistake, let alone send a text message or perform any kind of data input to play the ‘games’, make notes in the ‘calendar’, or browse through the four billion pictures a mini-videos you’ve saved using the stupid built-in camera(s).
Wouldn’t it be nice if they spent the money they waste on fancy microprocessors, huge colour LCDs and ridiculous arrays of ringtones on making the ‘phone, say, waterproof? Water covers 70% of the Earth’s surface and falls regularly from the sky so, unless you’re designing a ‘phone for exclusive use in the Atacama Desert or inside a plastic bag, why not make it immune to the stuff?
My current mobile will one day die, and I’ll be forced to buy one of these monstrosities. In the meantime, I shan’t be making any calls whilst walking perilously close to lakes. Or using an Apple Mac mouse, if I can help it.