The Power of Personalization (or not…)
My wife recently got a new phone. She said she didn’t really need an iPhone, so she went for an LG Cookie Plus. It’s a nice looking phone, with a decent-sized touch screen and quite a slim casing.
I played around with a bit and found it incredibly frustrating. The touch screen isn’t as responsive as the iPhone’s. Swiping is as likely to move something as it is to do what you actually want it to do. In lists, it is way too easy to select something when you want to scroll. Etc.
My wife said she wanted to send it back and go back to using her old Sony-Ericsson candybar phone.
But then a funny thing. She changed the wallpaper. She changed the background color from black to white. She changed the icon set from the default iPhone-like one to one that looked hand-drawn.
And suddenly the phone wasn’t so bad after all.
What happened here? A couple of things. First, she had made the phone her own. And maybe because of this, she was more willing to give it a chance.
Second (and I think, more importantly) the phone did not seem to take itself so seriously any more. Instead of being a vastly inferior iPhone wannabe, it was something else. It had stopped trying to be something it very obviously was not.
It was suddenly more honest. It’s just a shame that it wasnt like that from the start.
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