Removing Obstacles

I was talking to a friend the other week who'd just switched mobile carriers, mainly because he got a new job. In addition to the screwups that seem to be par for the course when porting a number, the biggest problem he had was figuring out how to easily transfer all his contacts from the old phone to the new. Every simple method wouldn't work: saving them to the SIM was out since the phones were locked to different carriers; one phone only had Bluetooth while the other only had infrared; one would sync fine with his computer, the other couldn't, and so on. I think he eventually had to just re-enter them all by hand.

Sure, this isn't a big deal, but it's symptomatic of an attitude in the mobile industry that thinks it's okay to leave pointless obstacles for customers. Just as application and service developers need to take things a step futher, operators and handset vendors need to be about removing those obstacles. In an industry that's synonymous with poor service, anybody that can straighten these things out will enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage.

Let's go back to the contacts example. If a carrier wants to attract users to switch from its rivals, it needs to make the process as simple as possible. Having to key in all your contacts in by hand might require enough effort to dissuade some people from jumping ship -- so why don't carriers offer to take the contacts from their old phone and transfer them to the new one? Technology for this exists already, so why not implement it? The same goes to handset vendors. Again, this is a small issue -- but that means it (and sync in general) should have been solved long ago!

I saw news this week that a Portuguese operator is offering a backup service to its users, which saves contacts, messages and photos. That's a no-brainer: operators keep contacts synced to the network (like on the Danger Hiptop), so if a device gets lost or broken, they can be easily and immediately downloaded. Adding a web interface also makes it easy to add contacts from a computer.

It's these types of things that need to be happening. Has nobody at an operator ever lost their phone and had to re-enter their contacts? Have execs of handset vendors never tried to use PC sync software and seen what a mess it is? I find it hard to believe that people could be so out of touch with their own products and customers.