Why Are Inbstruments Designed To Make Life Easy, Becoming Ever Harder To Use?

Such as portable telephones?

Bounced into buying a brand new portable telephone - I need only to make voice calls and text messages, and then briefly and infrequently; I am not one of those teenage girls who spend all day acquiring RSI by tap-tap-tappety-tap on little blocks of plastic. Nor do I believe in walking round supermarkets and into pedestrians by concentrating on shouting at a block of plastic glued to the ear.

- I ended up with a nightmarish contraption, an LG something-or-other: the model label is inside, found only by taking the back off and removing the battery.

Its text feature is better than the old multi-letter press-buttons, but that's about it....

It took me a while to find instructions (see above on identifying it, as I'd lost the packaging), but these revealed the telephone aspect is only peripheral. LG  lists it as an application rather than main function.

It's also bulky, so less portable than the previous generation, at about twice the area; and surprisingly heavy. Plus its battery runs down rapidly if you leave it switched on.


I am trying to wean use away to a second, older, simpler Nokia 'phone, with different service-provider and number but basically a telephone first, not a miniature PC/camera/games-machine on which you can reputedly also ring people. I can call out on the LG but it will not let me answer calls to it as the "swipe" move of a flashing icon to answer does not work.


The last straw came this afternoon. Part way through hospital follow-up treatment I wanted some advice but that led nowhere despite using a land-line phone and the number I was given. Then late tonight I switched the LG on to find the doctor I needed to find had rung me this afternoon - I was elsewhere without that phone - and left a voice message. The display told me how to recover it, but....

..... Bloody Typical! A recording saying "Press 1 for Reply, 2 to save, 3 to delete...etc"

You can't. The virtual keyboard is not on the voice-message screen! I think I noted the number so I can ring tomorrow, properly, but I have no idea if the message has been saved.


These instruments were intended to help our lives. Over the years they did so, and indeed improved to a point, but also collected more superfluous rammel; and now they are more rammel than function, and ever harder and clumsier to use.

Anyone know why we cannot have simple, efficient equipment that genuinely helps us; rather than what the makers tell we will have irrespective of personal needs?

Some people say it's "progress". I suggest they learn to differentiate between Progress - meaning time - and Improvement - meaning quality!