How many times have you played around with a mates phone only to do something that warrants a cry of: “what the hell did you do to it!?!” I know I’ve done it in the past. It’s actually surprisingly easy to change a setting by accident and then take three hours and a lot of frustration tying to fix the problem.

Well a new survey of 4,000 people has proven that modern mobile phone users are in the same boat – often getting enraged and frustrated by a tiny piece of plastic, filled with circuit boards that are supposed to make your life easier.

The survey by consultants Mformation found that 61 percent of users found setting up a new mobile phone they have bought was as stressful as changing over a bank account.

The survey, taken in the UK and US found that 85 percent of users got easily frustrated at the amount of effort required to set up a new handset, and that 95 percent of those people would be encouraged to try new technology if it was made easier to set up.

Matthew Bancroft, a spokesman for the consultants said that users were frustrated at having to call high rate technical support lines or search online for assistance.

“There is an enormous range of things modern phones are capable of doing but the paradox is that many people are not using these capabilities,” he said.

Mr Bancroft said that having a difficult experience with a handset put people off of updating to a new handset.

“If an application does not work once or twice, they just will not use it or try again,” he said.

Around 61 percent of the people surveyed said they just didn’t use an application if it caused them set up problems. Mr Bancroft said that setting up a phone should take no longer than 15 minutes but some people were spending around a hour or more trying to get the handset to do what they want.

He added that most users would like to use the modern phones to browse the internet, read emails and send picture messages, but the complexity of these handsets was leading to confusion.

Mr Bancroft recommends that their should be an industry standard set up that explains how to set up every phone on the market.

He believes however, that with phones cramming more processing power in to handsets that the computational ability could be used to anticipate what users will do next and help them with the set up. He says mobile operators need to rectify the issue soon because data services are likely to form a bigger part of their revenues in the future.

“People are already using handsets as much as possible to do voice calls,” he said.

Tags: mobile phones, tech problems
This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 10:22 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.