Ain't the latest cellphones nice and small and cute!
Unfortunately they *ALL* seem to be small, and this is a problem.
I have just spent a couple of hours with the old fella across the road trying to help him come to grips with a cellphone (Nokia 1100) which he got "in case of an emergency". Now he is no fool, but these new fangled cellphones are a bit of a mystery. It took over 2 hours to just go through the basics of turning it on, turning it off, and making a call.
Not hard you may say, but consider that the modern cellphone is not a telephone, it is a complex radio frequency device which is capable of allowing telephone calls. The telephone is a device which is installed by an technician, and setup ready to go; you just pick up the handset, and make a call. With the cellphone, you have to set it up yourself, you have to connect it to the network, and then you may make a call. All a bit of a challenge, if you are not familiar with it.
So when we were working through the operations, it became obvious to me that the dinky wee phone keys were too small for my friend's fat agricultural fingers as they mashed two or three buttons at a time. Once we substituted the end of a pencil for fingers, the next hurdle was the accessiblity of the display, and particularly *the menu*. A tricky concept to get across, when all we want to do is turn the phone off.
The size of the display was a challenge for him, as in his advanced years, his eye-sight is particularly poor, but he coped remarkably well. It did however make me aware of the fact that I also have difficultlies with my phone due to my need to put on a pair of reading glasses every time I use it. I cannot read the display clearly without them, and I sure-as-shit can't read the abc txting letters on the keypad (I don't do a lot of txting so I don't memorise them : I probably don't do a lot of txting 'cos I can't read the keys!).
About ten years back, I stopped wearing a wristwatch, as my cellphone doubled as a clock, but that was in the bad old days when the display characters were a decent size. My current Nokia phone (after years of various Ericsson phones) has the time in a microscopic text in the top corner. I CAN'T READ THAT. A nice touch is to have the screensaver show the time (nice BIG characters) but unfortunately this is unreadable in most light conditions, and as soon as I trigger the backlight on the display, the screensaver dissappears.
Consequently, I basically don't have a timepiece any more (and I won't submit to any of the recent avalance of spam selling fake Rolexs).
For me, the answer is to get one of the more complex (and expensive) phones which incorporate just about every other function, and have a large display.
For the old fella across the road, there is no technology which is *REAL SIMPLE* with big keys and big display. For him, there is only blind faith in the quick dials (as long as he remembers to turn it on first) ... using a stick.