Do you ever reach the Plateau of Productivity with your smartphone?
I write about phones here on ZDNet and as regular readers know I spend a lot of money and switch phones quite often. However, it is my job to write about these mobile devices and thus I tell people to not try to keep up with my phone purchases and keep up with me, but to read my reviews and reviews of others before making your own purchase decision. It may seem like I am never satisfied with a phone, but remember I need to check out phones running all the mobile operating systems to cover them in depth here and I actually could be very satisfied with phones from even a couple of years ago. I just read an excellent guest article by Matt Radford over at The Really Mobile Project titled, Perpetually Dissatisified and that may appear how I am here on ZDNet and may reflect how many of us reading this blog (I assume most of you are mobile phone fans or you wouldn't be reading this blog) feel about our phones as well.
I found the article to be quite true and agree I probably live in the Peak of Inflated Expectations and Trough of Disillusionment zones most of the time. It is actually quite exhausting and expensive to live in these zones and never reach the Slope of Enlightenment or Plateau of Productivity. There have been a couple of devices over the last few years that I have reached these one or both of these two levels with, notably the Nokia E71, T-Mobile Dash, and one variation or other of the iPhone. I actually think the Palm Pre Plus I just purchased with Verizon Wireless may be one of these devices that I have for at least a year (current contract length) that lets me reach the Plateau of Productivity zone.
If I was not a writer about smartphones I can honestly say that I could have reached the Plateau of Productivity zone with several devices because so many released over the last couple of years have just about everything you could want in a phone and blow away what we had just a few years ago. At times I sit back and pause and wish for that break where I could reach this zone, but then Google, HTC, Apple, Palm, and Nokia rumors pop up again and I dive right back into my hunter mode looking for the latest and greatest.