Assorted Afflatuses

Every so often, I receive an invitation to join some Facebook group with a title like, "I dropped my phone in the toilet and I need your numbers!" Clearly, a demand exists for technologies that backup the contents of a phone to, say, a computer. Much to many peoples' surprise, a technology for doing just that exists, and has existed for almost seven years. Yet, few people realize this and even of those in-the-know, few people backup their phones. I blame poor human interface design.

Just about every phone sold in the last two years has a Bluetooth radio. This Bluetooth technology enables devices — such as a computer and a cell phone — within 30 feet of one another to talk, wirelessly. Thus, just about everyone who has purchased a cell phone in the last two years could backup their phone — names, addresses and phone numbers included — to ensure they needn't reenter their hundred zillion contacts using one of those painfully cramped numeric keypads.

But almost no one does. And, for the longest time, I could not figure out why. In the last five years I have gone through five cell phones. (Four of which have been iPhones. Apple keeps giving me duds, though they have replaced them all free of charge.) With each of those five phones I have never spent more than five minutes loading all my contact data onto the device, thanks to Bluetooth.

It occurred to me, however, as I restored my latest replacement iPhone yesterday afternoon, how much easier it is to load contact information onto the iPhone, and how much more difficult it was for me to coerce my old Nokia to do the same.

At that point I realized it all comes down to human interface design. First and foremost, most PC manufacturers do not include a Bluetooth radio in the computer by default. Thus, for the vast majority of the Windows-using world, it's technically impossible to backup its phones via Bluetooth!

This is a tremendous oversight. Many, many people want to backup their cell phone. Many, many people also own cell phones with a Bluetooth radio. Finally, a Bluetooth radio costs a computer manufacturer a whopping two dollars. That two dollar addition can make a person's computer a whole lot more useful.

Of course, the problems don't end there. On the Windows side, most cell phone manufacturers use proprietary software to sync their phones with users' computers. This proprietary software may, or may not, be included in the box with the cell phone. Either way, the user has to actively install the software from a mysterious CD in the box with his or her cell phone, or go online, hunt down and install a software package.

And, inevitably, those software packages do not make it easy for the phone and the computer to speak with one another.

On the Mac, it's a little easier. First and foremost, just about every Mac sold in the last four years comes with Bluetooth. Most cell phones also communicate with Apple's iSync software out of the box, without any additional drivers or downloads. But even on the Mac, for the mythical "average" computer user, setting up the sync is complicated. One has to first pair the phone, which, depending on the cell phone can be tricky, and then setup iSync, a program Apple says little about, thus reducing the chances the "average" user knows about it.

The only phone I know of that makes backup truly painless is, of course, the iPhone. I plug it in, iTunes opens and, voilà, synchronization.

But that begs the question, why doesn't everyone make syncing so simple?

If the technology companies decided to worked together, they could easily come up with some standard protocol for making cell phone sync painless.

Computer manufacturers could include a Bluetooth radio with every computer sold, and Microsoft and Apple could develop some kind of system, integrated with the operating system, that "listens" for nearby cell phones with Bluetooth. Then, when a user powers on their cell phone in proximity to their computer, it could prompt the user to setup sync.

There are some rather obvious problems with such a simple solution — I can easily see myself sitting in an airport terminal and going insane as hundreds of prompts to "Sync with Bob Smith's Cell Phone?" crowd my screen. Perhaps cell phone manufacturers could include a prominent "Sync" button either in the phone's interface, or on the phone itself to put the phone in its discoverable mode.

Collectively, people waste thousands of hours reentering millions of phone numbers, simply because technology companies cannot make phone sync simple. At this point, I say everyone should just buy an iPhone. Which is a great reason for everyone else to think about making the synchronization system simpler. As for the toilets, waterproof phones would just be too bulky and clumsy.