With reference to some of these last posts. When I first got a call on my new(and first) smartphone I wasn’t able to answer the call, try as I might. This went on for several days until I could ask someone (no little instruction booklets to advise with modern technology)
There was this green phone symbol and this red phone symbol. Push the green symbol as many times as you like and you still wont connect.
Which dunderhead in their infinite wisdom thought to add that you had to swipe up from the green symbol, not left right or down but only up. And.was this the same moron that then negated to put a little image on or inside the box along with all the useless junk to show how to do it. And which absolute cretin decided that the print on the method to insert a sim card could be so small that you need a magnifying because they didn’t want to be seen as dumbing down.
And don’t get me started on websites. Prob99% are absolute crap, created by superior beings for themselves. What do customers matter?
On Android I presume?
Yes I also struggled with this for a bit until I googled it. Reason appears to be that people complained that when simply tapping, they would unintentionally make calls or take calls they did not want to take. Now it appears it is industry standard to sweep up or sidewise. I agree, very unintuitive until you get used to it and even then sometimes annoying. At least they could make it configurable like almost everything else.
There is more. I could never make the finger sensor work to unlock the phone. Heaven knows why. Face unlock works unreliably, probably because what creeps out of bed every morning looks significantly different than what is trying to use it later in the day…
As for the tiny sim and SD cards… yea, almost a watchmakers skill required these days. Thankfully one has to do this only once. The last time I took a phone from the company I have my subscription with and whenever I bought one over the counter I had them do it. Since “free” phones are a thing of the past, the last few times I had to do it myself… well, I also change watch batteries now so I manage…
There are positive stories too, sometimes quite unexpected. My mother in law is 89 years old (actually had her birthday yesterday). She’s been using Skype on her computer for years to stay in touch with us (she lives in Bulgaria). The fact alone that she learnt well into her 80ties how to use a PC is remarkable. So this summer I gave her a phone to try if she likes it. Actually a chinese fake I got given from someone, a Huawai Clone from Wish with a big screen and a pretty good battery life. And wonders and behold, she is happy with it and uses it a lot. So I’ll upgrade her to a Xiaomi eventually (next time I go there).
Off topic ON:
A warning at this place: On Wish, where I buy a lot of tools and stuff you can’t really get elsewhere for reasonable prices, they offer fake smart phones and tabletts for about 80$. They are called P30, 40 or S30Ultra or similar. Other than a lot of things I bought there, I can only warn to buy any of those. They are fake to the max, in as so far that the specs are totally wrong. They usually have only 1 GB RAM, are quite slow and their Android version is 6 or earlier. ROM is claimed to be 512 GB or some random number, but they are much less in reality, somewhere around 64 GB at max. However, they are tweaked to indicate that they have 512 GB so any data you try to save on it will simply disappear if the true memory is full! (same problem with some fake memory sticks they sell too) I got two of them given to me by people who bought them. The first one is totally unusable (even though I had to use it for a few days during the pandemic until I could replace my broken Samsung and keep it as it literally saved my butt then), slow, battery lasts for about half a day.
The later one (calles itself a S30Ultra) is now in use with my mother in law. It is much better, has a decent camera and most of all a very respectable battery life (about 2 days the way she uses it) but that is it. It can do Skype, Whatsapp, Facebook and Viber, has an internet browser and some pre-installed apps like Google calendar e.t.c. but those apps fill up the RAM, so nothing else can be installed. The fake ROM makes things worse: The only way not to loose your pictures you take due to the fake ROM size is to use a SD card and to tell the phone to work on it only. And of course any claims of 5G is totally fake. Beyond an emergency replacement to keep in a drawer or to try someone out on smartphones in the way I’ve done it, they are for nothing.
So stay away from them. All they can do is to be a communication device which they do badly. For the same price, you can get a used Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, of which I have 2 in use, they are great phones with long battery life and good operating system. The only thing to know with older Xiaomi phones is that you need to use the charging cable that came with it and ONLY that one or you risk ruining the Mini USB plug they have. Not an issue with newer Redmi’s which are USB-C however.
Off topic /OFF
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Now it appears it is industry standard to sweep up.
Hmmm. On my Samsung Galaxy S10e, you swipe right…
Airborne_Again wrote:
Hmmm. On my Samsung Galaxy S10e, you swipe right…
You are right, on my Note 8 as well…. now you mention it I should have said sweeping appears to be industry standard… somehow I thought it was up when @gallois mentioned it… it is on the chinese phone and I believe on Xiaomi
Peter wrote:
The best satnav ever was Nokia Maps (a program Nokia bought in) which was totally offline and “just worked”
Nokia maps became Here Maps. You can still get it.
Got it; looks very nice. Audio doesn’t work 
And there is no config for how it should work (bluetooth, or to the phone speaker?).
This thread could so easily become a catalogue (of an infinite length) of obscure IT issues which are damn annoying, cannot be solved even by experts, are often solved by uninstalling/reinstalling, are often solved by dumping the said item or program and installing another one, and nobody knows why, and nobody will ever find out why, and nobody is ever interested in finding out why, there is no support other than, in some cases, “support forums”, which the manufacturer never participates in and probably never reads.
Now imagine somebody who is not going to waste their life googling for solutions and posting questions on “support forums”. That is, approximately, most people.
According to snopes.com this old news group post is the origin of the all-time classic “goofy user / frustrated techie” story. Every version I have ever heard includes “return it to the shop” as verbatim, but here it is only l’esprit de l’escalier :-)
That’s great
Many years ago, I was in a computer shop and two ladies brought in a PC they bought a few days before. They said “it has no internet in it”.
The sales guy didn’t know where to start. The PC didn’t have a modem, for a start. But how do you explain what “internet” is?
We can laugh at this, but if you think about it, the problem is non-trivial.
DavidS wrote:
According to snopes.com this old news group post is the origin of the all-time classic “goofy user / frustrated techie” story.
Good one, I did actually not know that one. According to other sources, the origin is the one, where a lady calls tech support that she can’t switch on her computer she just bought. After 20 mins of making sure all cables were plugged in and so on, he finally asked, well, how are you switching it on then? “With that foot switch which came with it”.
Peter wrote:
We can laugh at this, but if you think about it, the problem is non-trivial.
I agree.
And tech support vs users is one thing, they are paid to deal with this and (hopefully) also psychologically trained to a) know how to deal with the users and b) keep themselves out of the madhouse.
The bigger problem is within families or workgroups where there IS no support and where the more tech affine people work their way into an asylum trying to keep their families / workgroups problems in check. Not paid, not trained, 24/7 hours and so on.
Incidently I still revert to @Mailbuflyers post which I think has a lot of truth in it. The large difference between those who manage and those who do not is their way of problem solving in general. Those who cry for help at the slightest problem most probably also will be those who will never even try to understand how to deal with any sort of tech anomaly which comes their way.
So frankly, maybe we have been going about teaching these people how to deal with tech problems the wrong way. Maybe they need problem solving skills first of all, psychological coaching for self esteem and self capability and probably by then they can do with most of the stuff by themselves.
I think computers attract a certain sort of personality who likes to play with things and isn’t scared of making mistakes, but I do know some accomplished people who are no good with them. I nearly failed a year because the orthopaedic surgeon who was meant to complete my last assessment kept putting it off until the deadline was literally minutes away. Finally he got a rocket from the management, and so we sat down at a desk and I suddenly began to realise why he had been putting it off for so long. He struggled to find the ‘on’ switch. Then he had to get a slip of paper with his password out of his wallet. He just about managed to open his Email program, but couldn’t search for the relevant Email. By this point he was literally sweating and shaking. I kept thinking back to a short story by Isaac Asimov about a man who is hypnotised to be allergic to computers as a punishment for computer crime. The actual assessment webpage was simply too much for him: I loaded it up and entered whatever he told me to. Yet he was an excellent surgeon (orthopaedic surgery is as close to mechanical engineering as medicine gets). I can’t imagine he would have failed to learn to use a computer had he put his mind to it, but obviously he had devoted his life rather single-mindedly to other things.
Speaking personally, I have sometimes struggled to take pictures for people using their iphones, and it has reached the point that I can no longer readily help my parents with their Windows computers, simply because I have not owned and had to administer a Windows computer for so long myself. A lot of it is about familiarity, and whilst interfaces have become more intuitive and features more discoverable, you still have to learn your way around them.
