Santa Fe
01-05-2004, 10:43 PM
It seems to me that for the Smartphone to really become as popular and useful as the first Palms and later PPC’s there needs to a lot of software available to allow individual users to customize their devices to suit their individual needs on any given day.
For example I sometimes need more PDA features than phone features. It would be very nice to have a home screen that showed multiple calendar entries that I could scroll through instead of one entry. At other times it would be preferable to show all my tasks on the home screen and be able to scroll through them. That way when I drove the 10 miles into town and got distracted in the bike shop I would not forget to pick up the linens my wife ordered (true!). But to be easy to use the selection of various home screens should be a quick menu solution.
Another customization I’d like is the ability to access my calendar in month view without going through the week view, which I find worthless. That seems like an easy menu option to add.
If it is a weekend or I’m feeling like using up some minutes a plug in that showed the scores of selected sporting events would be fun. I sometimes use a text alert service for that but that requires going to a site from my PC and setting it up and remembering to delete it later.
Another useful feature to me would be an Itinerary program that worked with Outlook and Internet Explorer to identify my flights and at user-defined times update my flight information. So when the commuter plan from Santa Fe to Denver is an hour late I can immediately find out the status of my connecting flight and the gate it is leaving from. And if as usual I have to take a later plane it would be easy to go to a note section that contained the email addresses or phone addresses of the people I’m supposed to be meeting with and send them all a message of my delay by pushing a of couple of buttons.
This might not be possible but it would be useful to have the phone turn itself on at a pre-selected time, say right before a wake-up alarm. I sometimes turn the radio function off to achieve this but I’m still wasting battery life. To be really useful a once a day automatic downloading of the e-mail along with the wake-up alarm would be handy.
All these things have a work-around and probably are not useful to anyone but me. However that is my point. Allowing users the flexibility to customize is key to the devices success. To pre-determine how everyone is going to use the smartphone is a potential handicap.
For example I sometimes need more PDA features than phone features. It would be very nice to have a home screen that showed multiple calendar entries that I could scroll through instead of one entry. At other times it would be preferable to show all my tasks on the home screen and be able to scroll through them. That way when I drove the 10 miles into town and got distracted in the bike shop I would not forget to pick up the linens my wife ordered (true!). But to be easy to use the selection of various home screens should be a quick menu solution.
Another customization I’d like is the ability to access my calendar in month view without going through the week view, which I find worthless. That seems like an easy menu option to add.
If it is a weekend or I’m feeling like using up some minutes a plug in that showed the scores of selected sporting events would be fun. I sometimes use a text alert service for that but that requires going to a site from my PC and setting it up and remembering to delete it later.
Another useful feature to me would be an Itinerary program that worked with Outlook and Internet Explorer to identify my flights and at user-defined times update my flight information. So when the commuter plan from Santa Fe to Denver is an hour late I can immediately find out the status of my connecting flight and the gate it is leaving from. And if as usual I have to take a later plane it would be easy to go to a note section that contained the email addresses or phone addresses of the people I’m supposed to be meeting with and send them all a message of my delay by pushing a of couple of buttons.
This might not be possible but it would be useful to have the phone turn itself on at a pre-selected time, say right before a wake-up alarm. I sometimes turn the radio function off to achieve this but I’m still wasting battery life. To be really useful a once a day automatic downloading of the e-mail along with the wake-up alarm would be handy.
All these things have a work-around and probably are not useful to anyone but me. However that is my point. Allowing users the flexibility to customize is key to the devices success. To pre-determine how everyone is going to use the smartphone is a potential handicap.