Tuesday 20 July 2010

Feature or Bug - how do you end an annoying call?

My first mobile phone in 1998 had a detachable antenna (you could just screw the antenna off). This design feature enabled a socially acceptable mechanism to end annoying conversations by losing the connection. When talking became boring you told the communication partner that it seems that the connection gets worse (while you unscrewed the antenna) and then when you detached the antenna the call was usually dropped.

Reading about the iPhone I thought about this long forgotten feature and expected that Apple listened to its users and that there is a next version of this feature - nowadays implemented as touch interaction (not screwing required) on the iPhone 4. The photo shows a phone where the feature is disabled by some rubber cover.

I was really disappointed that Apple tells us it is a bug