A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing the magazine shelves at Books A Million. The latest issue of Maximum PC had one of those silly cover article teasers. In large letters was the single word “SHOWDOWN”. Underneath the headline, in slightly smaller block letters, was the teaser: “WE NAME THE BEST PHONES IN SEVEN CRITICAL AREAS”. The seven critical areas were then listed:
1. Display Quality,
2. Photos and Video,
3. Chassis Design,
4. Gaming,
5. Battery,
6. Keyboard, and
7. Raw Performance.
Does anything about that list of critical cell phone areas seem strange to you? Don’t you think that one of the critical areas of a telephone should be call quality?
Of course, that got me to thinking about how we seem to focus on less important things. Of course, we call almost always refer to them as “critical areas”. Ask anybody how big the hard drive in their computer is and they will probably know the answer. Then ask them how many RPMs the disk makes, or what the seek time is, or what the data transfer rate is and you’ll likely get a blank stare. I’d venture to guess that many salesmen in the store wouldn’t know either, but you can bet they’ll focus on the drive size.
Those same salesman will help you buy a monitor. I guarantee they’ll focus on how big the screen is while neglecting to tell you about important things like resolution, viewing angle, response time, etc. Although those are all “critical areas”, don’t you think the view is probably what you should focus on?
Don’t get me started on cameras. Lots of megapixels are important, but they don’t mean you’re going to get a better picture. Sensor size, start up time, shutter lag, image stabilization are all important. It’s the picture quality that is important, not the cameras “critical areas”.
I think this mentality has spilled over into other facets of life. Our politicians tell us all about the “critical areas” of government that they are going to fix. I’d just like them to fix the important stuff. Oops, I forgot, the only important thing to them is getting reelected.
I could probably go on for a couple of pages complaining about “critical areas” that don’t really mean much, but I’ve done enough ranting and raving for one article. By the way, it doesn’t make much difference to me what the call quality of my phone is. I hardly ever answer the darn thing anyway.
Thanks for reading.