XXX

Thirty in Roman Numerals is XXX and we know the three together are often used for love and kisses besides to their snide relationship with porn. So when I read somewhere that most of us use barely thirty percent of the capabilities of a smartphone or any other gadget, I wasn’t surprised. ‘After all,’ I told myself, ‘this number is divisible by the sum of its digits! If it can be called Harshad number, it can represent facts without documentation as well.’ But then I stumbled upon the binary code of thirty and found it is 11110… and I said, ‘Hey! Most of us make voice calls, send SMSes, use Whatsapp, and browse the net for fun. This makes up the 1111 component, and the 0 is like going round and round without ever wishing to stop so this must be representative of audio and video entertainment. Most people with smartphones do just this and, therefore, use only 30% of what it can do.’

Thirty percent has a lot of interesting connections with life. Most health plans, diet plans, beauty plans tend to be 30 day plans. There is a thumb rule saying that one must not spend more than 30% of one’s income on housing. The famous 50-20-30 rule specifies that only 30% of income must be ear-marked for flexible spending. One of the dailies goes on to write that ‘92 per cent don’t use all of the features on their phone, with 30 per cent admitting they aren’t even close to using everything their phone is capable of.’

But let us come back to smartphones. If thirty percent is all most of us are going to ever use, why bother about processors and their speeds, RAM and if it is enough or not, and other complex things like activating gesture control. So I decided to take a peek inside a few smartphones and what I found was truly shocking.

The shocking facts about smartphone usage

The clock was being used to see time but there were lesser people using the alarm and almost no one had ever used the timer. The world clock was a fancy thing that remained where it was and only people like me whose son happens to live in London were bothered about using a dual time on the screen. Even I wasn’t ever going to see what time it was in Khartoum or Nagasaki and so this feature in my smartphone too is terribly under-utilised. Yes, I use not one but multiple photo-editing apps but more than 90% of users were not bothered about even the default editing software in their smartphone. Come on, all they did was click a picture and shared it on Whatsapp… sometimes even a series of thirty photos looking similar. The Games Centre or some such hub, voice dictation, podcasts, health monitors, stopwatch, compass, reminders, GPS navigation, voice recognition, notes, and even e-readers are all in the category of not used or seldom used.

How many of us are even getting inside ‘settings’ to see if the fancy fingerprint scanner can do more than just open the phone? Forget the tech enthusiasts because they will want to either do everything including rooting their phones. Even they may, however, not really be using all these features that phones come saturated with. How often do we go and explore the gestures functions and tweak them to help us use a gadget better? How many of us are afraid to even use mobile payment systems? How many of us are comfortable with shopping online, paying online, banking online, and using online modes of sending or receiving payments? How many of us even open multiple apps to do things at the same time? I mean, we do leave apps open and forget to close them but that is different thing altogether. How many of us even want to have our pictures printed on large formats? Not many. What this means is that we simply go ahead and buy an expensive smartphone that is capable of doing or helping us do all these things and more but use it only for voice calls and messaging.

One of my friends who is a successful lawyer held the latest Galaxy S and wasn’t aware that he could jot a fast note even without first opening the device  and then searching for Memos or Notes. I asked another friend what she did on her really high priced iPhone and she replied, ‘Hmmm, call friends. I click pictures. And… well… what else? I send messages too.’

‘That’s it?’ I prodded, ‘You don’t edit your pictures ever? You don’t draw or doodle or sketch? You don’t write poems while sitting in a park? You don’t read e-books?’

‘Come on, where is the time for all this. And I have my Kindle for e-books,’ she said, and hurriedly added, ‘I haven’t read any book there but have plenty in store.’

So if you who are reading this post just look within and ask, ‘Why do I need a phone for?’ You will know your needs and will probably understand that no one is possibly impressed by infinity displays or notches here or there. No one is bothered if the cover is glass and metal or if there are dual hues there. No one is bothered about mega pixels so long as the pictures clicked are reasonably clear and can be printed on small formats for personal albums. Of course everyone can aspire to have a state-of-the-art camera technology in a smartphone and love bokehs and good low light performance… but these are things that many users get without having to understand much. But the moment one talks about manual operations and settings where one needs to know more about white balance, focal lengths, and aperture, we are into the vast ocean of 70% things that remain unused.

We are living in times when the wizardry of gadgets is getting all the magical things that attract. The penetration and geography of usage is increasing. There are studies that had earlier predicted that consumers will be carrying three to four devices… but listen, these studies never mention anything about how deep into a gadget performance a user will like to be. Personal device use is in billions now, wearables are proliferating and health and fitness devices are gaining ground… but this also means that gadget stress is poised to grow. The only way out for users is to either understand all features and use them to make life easier OR opt for simpler and less expensive devices that are anyway doing all that they wanted to do.

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How well do we know the gadget we own

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Indispire prompt_October 2018

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Arvind Passey
18 October 2018