Whilst I think its pretty obvious that the operators don’t really have the first clue about how to add value to the smartphone experience, I continue to find it hard to believe their complete lack of ability to get the basics right. My experience yesterday receiving a MMS typifies this so I thought I’d document the user experience. Here’s the text notification I received on my Nokia N97 Smartphone:
Okay not ideal but I guess for some reason my device wasn’t recognised and I was given the default where the message is retrievable online… Unfortunately there’s no mobile website:
…and even before I get to discover this I get one of those all too familiar “Not trusted” notifications that help to disaude customers from ever actually trying to do anything on the mobile internet:
Persisting when I’m sure most customers would have given up, it was no surprise that the PC web experience wasn’t much better:
Requiring me to jump through completely unnecessary clicking:
…but hold on a minute that’s a neat touch… great I’m being offered the opportunity to send a free reply!
But I’m timed out when I click to try it (despite being online for a total of about 1 minute)
While 3G Video Calling faces similar usability challenges (that Apple’s FaceTime is doing a good job of trying to fix) in 2010 can there really be any excuse for the media giant that is MMS (the 3rd most widely used mass media platform – behind only FM radio and SMS text messaging) to remain so poorly supported by operators?
