The Conspiracy of Change
My life has been turned upside down lately. It all started with my car. I needed to replace it. So I bought the same make and model but a different year. It's amazing how different user interface items change in the span of a few years. The cruise controls were different, the center console configuration was different and radio was different.
My family tried to convince me that these items were better but if you're like me, you know that this isn't true. They conspired with the car to accept it as better. But I didn't want to learn how to do something new. I already knew how to work all of those items just fine.
Then the same thing happened to my TV as Comcast changed the user interface on the cable box without asking me. The nerve of them! At least give me the option of going back to the old look and feel. Even the buttons on the remote don't respond the same.
Then it happened to my phone. The PalmPre was discontinued by Sprint so I took the opportunity to change to the most popular phone system, the Android on brand new 4G technology. I got a new larger screen, joining everyone else and of course a new user interface.
I gave it my best to adapt to the new controls that were supposed to be better and it shouldn't have been that hard. After all, I already knew how to use one smartphone, translating that knowledge to a new smartphone should be easy.
But I missed many of the features of the PalmPre. I didn't have buttons anymore, it was all on screen. Getting my clumsy thumbs to hit the letter I wanted proved to be too hard. This made the spell correction an absolute necessity. But it corrected many items incorrectly and in my tech world many items are spelled awkardly to begin with; OSX became "occasion". And my last name is my last name, whether I like the spelling or not isn't the point. Just stop asking me if I want to correct it. I don't.
This all lead up to making my texts & tweets incomprehensible. Everything from "Woof you call me?" to "I'll be huff in a boat 2 hores." (I'll be home in about 2 hours.) Nice upgrade.
The larger screen was nice. But was it too large. That whole item of being happy to see someone and pockets started to come to mind repeatedly. Also, when the onscreen keyboard was showing, the screen didn't seem to be that large anymore. It actually seemed smaller.
This larger screen lead to the battery dying by dinner. Bad for any family member trying to connect for the nightly ritual.
The worst of it was the user interaction. What took one gesture on the PalmPre (swipe to delete an email) now took 3 with the Android (read email, menu, delete). The simple measure of going back even with it's permanent button seemed to not take me where I wanted to go. And switching applications was a seemingly impossibility.
Combine this all together and I was missing texts, missing phone calls and missing family dinners.
I gave it my best go for two weeks. As soon as I hit the two week mark, I switched back to the PalmPre and WebOS. WebOS, you're my hero. Never did I miss my swiping so much.