I took a photo over the weekend with my cheap phone, and wanted to share it with my friend who was in the picture.
I couldn’t.
Why? The image was about 25 pixels square. Somehow when my daughter was playing around with the phone’s camera, she changed the resolution. For me to find out how to change the resolution back, I had to find the box the phone came in, dig out the CD that had the manual on it, copy that file to my computer – and then search for the answer. (Manual is shown at the left.)
The phone settings area on the phone was not where the resolution setting was. It was buried deeper in another menu.
I’m not saying Apple is perfect – often I can find an answer to my Mac question faster by doing a Google search than by using its built-in help files. But I am saying that Apple mostly gets it right, when it comes to usability issues like this.
If you haven’t tried an Apple product, I’d suggest you start with an iPod. You might be amazed.
Why in the dickens would they label the manual section “Taking Camera”?
I have an LG phone, and they’re supposed to be technologically very strong, but I despise their menus. Usually completely counterintuitive and impractical. For instance, in the messaging menu there’s no way to delete a draft, and it’s very easy to create a draft accidentally. There’s also no way to save messages to the SD card, only to the phone or the SIM, so the message memory gets overloaded at about 400 messages. There seems to be no way to inactivate the internet icon, so it’s easy to go online by mistake if I put the phone in my pocket before locking it.
My daughters have a couple of iPods, and their main gripe is the hassle of synching music and the resulting lack of control.
No platform is perfect! You know that.
At least as technology goes forward, some universal improvements happen.