Summary
Mid-market cell phones and their brethren all have a big usability issue limiting their profitability: they are mostly not designed for the aging user, and such users represent a large market share. Take note, mobile industry execs, and evolve your product portfolios to leverage this untapped market.
Analysis
An ABI Research interviewee in this article stated mobile makers "need to evolve their product portfolios". Yes, but the answer lies not only in the rise of the smart phone and open source applications for them, but in their ergonomic success.
In the US alone, a large part of the mobile phone market demographic is over 40 and wearing corrective lenses. Many have mobility issues with fingers, such as arthritis or just "really big guy" size fingers. The mobile's small, crunched together buttons, tiny button print and matchbook-size screen may sell portability and chic, but these design decisions daily cramp the style of those sporting specs and pocketfuls of NSAIDs for their digital osteoarthritis.
We crones and doddards of the over 40 crowd use smartphones, mid-market phones, and even the occasional disposable phones. We are lawyers, physicians, physicists, programmers, artists, and all manner of people who can perhaps afford any of these devices, but we demur because they are extraordinarily ergonomically inadequate.
Its not that we can't keyboard as fast as our offspring. We text with the best. We email stream-of-consciousness as well as appellate briefs and scholarly articles. We chat, we browse, we calendar. We just can't see where or what we're typing and our digital dexterity isn't what it was a few years ago when we daily dreamed of these devices.
I'd really like something newer and smarter, but I still have my 4-year-old flip phone only because of its oval buttons with the laser-blue halos, large-print screen, and silver, black, white key contrasts with numerals and even letters I can see. (Thank-you, Samsung.)
It is axiomatic there are more than a few mobile market Cx0s who also can't see their own devices and thus are victims of their own success. Wake up and smell the circuits, cell phone makers, and open that market to profits from the wizened.
