So far, I have found two things for which mobile phones are really good: safety (as in "I am broken down in the middle of BFE, please come rescue me") and courtesy/convenience ("I am am running late, be there in 20 minutes"). From a business standpoint, it also untethers you from your desk, but that isn't necessarily a good thing - I LIKE to be out of touch when I am away from my desk.
But mostly people use mobile phones for really pointless, trivial blabbing about really pointless trivial things, i.e., a pointless expense. We dumped our service a few months ago as a result, and I haven't missed it yet - I'd rather have the money. Of course with a baby due any day, if I was doing a lot of driving in the course of the day I would need to be reachable by phone. But I'm basically in the office - about one minute from home by car - all day so that isn't much of an issue.
From the above you can probably tell that I simply don't have a clue why people would pay actual money to "personalize" their ringtone with an articifical-sounding snippet of a pop song, or what-flipping-ever, but hey, I'm not a teenager and more power to them. Money is good:
- The sound of mobile ringing tones could be in for a big change if a new service proves as popular in Europe as it has been in South Korea.
Korean firm WiderThan's service lets you choose what the person calling you hears when phoning.
"It replaces your normal dial tone with music or any kind of content you want," said WiderThan's Jonathan Kim.
The service has been very popular in South Korea, and could be offered by European mobile networks by mid-2004.
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Article comments
1 - Craig Lyndall
When I bought my most recent phone, they tried to sell me a billion features and things. I told them I didn't want to download ring tones. I didn't want to take and/or send digital photos. I didn't want to connect to the most scaled down version of the internet. I didn't want to text or instant message people. Hell, I didn't want a color screen.
I WANTED A PHONE. I am afraid that eventually I will have no choice but to fall victim to the worst, most wasteful cases of feature creep in the history of the universe. Keep in mind that these are the things that they will sell you to keep their margins high.