My cellphone cerca 1995 finally gave out, it was dropped one too many times and the headpiece was dangling from the dialing pad. It was a tough decision to make, but my wife finally convinced me that the new high-tech Motorola V600 would at least offer all the features of my current phone.

Not surprisingly, my new phone falls short in some areas but excels in others. For any activity not related to making phone calls, the V600 does an excellent job. When making calls, however, there are some drawbacks. Perhaps the most noteworthy is how poorly the color display functions in daylight, it is almost impossible to read the screen when outside anytime during the day.

Sometimes it’s better to have a device that perform a specialized task without any additional capability. Our home phones did an excellent job for as long as I can remeber, aside from memory dial there really hasn’t been any significant features upgrade to your home phone since the divesture of AT&T. There are no games to play on my home phone, nor can I surf the web or check my email. Quite honestly, it does everything I need in a phone, after obtaining dialtone simply select the person I want to call and pretty “Talk”.

If only my cellphone were so simple to operate. What do I do if I’m in the middle of a game of Tetris and I receive a call? How can I use my phone to answer an inbound caller when I’m in the middle of adding another caller to my address book?

There’s something to be said for a simplified portable telephone, one that simply lets you put in numbers and make calls. Just like any good idea, this is one that will come back again once people figure out how unnecessary these newfangled features are.

Categories: Technology