While waiting to pick my son up from pre-school, I noticed that a parent standing next to me had a new BlackBerry Torch. I asked her how she liked it and she basically told me that she hated technology and that the only reason that she had a smartphone was because her husband bought it for her. As I talked to this parent, I began to realize that she didn’t hate technology, nor, did she hate the BlackBerry Torch. She was just frustrated by the fact that she had an expensive phone that did bunch of stuff that she would never do nor did she ever see herself doing the stuff that “smart phones” do.
This conversation really illustrated for me that with the massive influx of consumers picking up their first smartphone, perceptions about what is “cool” about smartphones are shifting away from what corporate users and gadget geeks think are cool. I’m sure this parent’s husband told her all the stuff that he likes about the BlackBerry, but, unfortunately, none of those “cool” things were applicable to how his wife would interact with her new BlackBerry Torch.
As we continued our conversation, I tried to think of applications that this novice smartphone user might find interesting. I noticed that she had four or five reward card bar code tags hanging off of her key chain, so, I showed her CardStar which I had running on my device… To make a long story short, I had to show her and another parent with a BlackBerry Curve how to install this application on their devices.
Of course, they both asked about other applications that they should install, so, I figured that would repeat the question here. What applications should new smartphone user install on their BlackBerry?
