Moblog's consumer monologue on being a UK mobile customer today
I was chatting to Alfie of MoblogUK earlier. I asked him how his Moblogging presentation went at yesterday’s New Directions in Mobile event.
I’d have liked to have gone — so I was delighted when he gave me this outline of his speech and a bit of an overview:
– Who
– What
– When
– How
Rather conveniently, Alfie then said to me, ‘Hey look, for the ‘who’ section there, Mat and I created this monologue from the point of view of a consumer. Want the text?’
Get in! Here it is:
“I don’t want mobile TV at five pounds a day, I don’t want a hundred different seemingly deliberately confusing price plans, I certainly don’t want to be a dolphin, and despite the bags under my eyes, I’m fairly sure I’m not a racoon. I’d love to have a ‘Magic Number’ to call a friend for an hour for 15p, but not when that’s because *you* want me to convince my friend to move over to your network, that’s just mean.
I don’t want to buy a lifestyle, I don’t want built in obsolescence, I don’t want a million free text messages but no MMS, I don’t want to be told that mobile internet/email is a new thing that I need to pay more for when I’ve been doing it for the past five years, I don’t want ridiculous roaming charges where it costs me to receive calls just because I’m in another country (although using the same phone network). It’s a mobile phone, location should be irrelevant.
I don’t want to pay through the nose just because I want to move non-voice data over the network, I don’t want my network provider to put their branding all over my handset’s internals, I don’t want them to add their advertising to MY MMS messages *when I’m paying to send them*. I don’t want ripoff artists selling me useless “content” for my handset at £1.50/tinyphoto or £3/crappy ringtone or £3/lamegame because although I know that I don’t need to buy ’em (I can upload my own ‘content’ to my phone), other people don’t and then Jamster or whoever make a tonne of money for doing almost nothing at all.
I want a phone with a good camera, a decent battery, an interface designed by someone who knows about HCI, a case that won’t break too easily and the ability to communicate using this device for a reasonable (ie, cheap enough never to worry about using it, like landlines are) price. It would be nice to have customer service that actually warranted the word ‘service’, but let’s not go crazy here.
Most networks are not providing what I want from a network. They need to stop hassling me, simplify everything, and drop their prices. Mobile communications must be one of the few areas where we pay more now than we did five years ago..”
That’s pleasure overload. Almost every sentence caused me to break into a ‘HELL YEAH’ in agreement.
