Can you imagine buying a car and during the first month you cannot lower the windows completely or you need to refuel every 100 km because the consumption is not properly adjusted? Well, something like this is happening with mobile phones, video games and other technology products.
First it was the operating systems. Later they were followed by video games with update patches that take up more space than the original game itself, and now this practice of release products with unfinished software has been extended to mobile telephony.
We see it more and more often. A manufacturer presents a new smartphone and after a few days it arrives in stores. The users, eager for new technology and a good dose of posturing, they run to the stores to buy it and discover that not everything works as it should.
Meanwhile, brand spokespersons are quick to call for calm announcing an update in the coming days that will correct this and other problems.
If you are a regular at ComputerHoy.com you will know thatThis is something that, as users, we have more than assumed as something habitual and almost normal. However, if we extrapolate this behavior to any other sector, would users accept being beta testers of the product they buy? I honestly I prefer my car’s brakes to work from day one.
There is a mantra among the so-called gurus of entrepreneurship and the business world that says that you should not wait for a product to be 100% ready to launch it on the marketand that is precisely what the big technology manufacturers are doing.
Those of us who have already combed some gray hairs may not look favorably on the fact that buy a device that does not function as expected throughout its life cycle. However, this strategy of polishing the operation of a device based on updates once it has been put up for sale It has several advantages and one major drawback..
The main advantage for users is that you can enjoy the latest technology immediately, Since at the rate at which this industry works, if they waited to have the products 100% tuned, we would probably have mobiles that are born with already obsolete components. Now a processor expires sooner than the yogurts you have in the fridge.
Companies like OnePlus have applied this launch model to the extreme. One of the best examples is the OnePlus Watch that we reviewed several months after its launch, seeing in first person its evolution as the weeks went by and one update after another was installed.
The truth is the watch we received and the one we finally reviewed seemed like totally different productsnot just in performance and reliability, but in features and aesthetics.
OnePlus’s is not, by far, an isolated case. Just under a month ago Nothing shipped the first units of the Nothing Phone (1), which was going to be the brand’s first smartphone. One of the first things I did when I received it was record its unboxing on video and give my first impressions after the first 24 hours of using this mobile.
Since that day, the Nothing Phone (1) has received 4 software updates which have significantly improved their performance.
Call me weird, but I’m one of those who read the news that will correct the patches before installing them and, with the arrival of the fourth update, one of the most outstanding was the fast charging optimization. Fantastic, something that can be measured! Said and done.
As you can see in the load chart, the Nothing Phone (1) does not exactly stand out for its loading speed, so any improvement will be welcome. In fact, in the load test that we do to all the devices that we analyze, it had given us a charging time of 1 hour and 55 minutes before installing the update.
The measurement result after the update could not have been more positive. ¡46 minutes less to complete the charge! It is a very graphic display of how the product evolves in the hand of the user, instead of doing it in a laboratory before going on sale.
Another advantage of this model of updates is that it allows brands to add additional functions that their users request, so that, in the medium term, the product not only works better, but also gets a little closer to users, gaining their loyalty. the brand.
Here again OnePlus can serve as an example with something that users of the first batch of OnePlus Nord could see first-hand, which, during its analysis, already showed some problems with color adjustment in one of its chambers and we record it in writing.
Just two weeks after the publication of that analysis OnePlus fixed those issues with color adjustment in Macro mode of your camera via a software update.
My experience analyzing mobile phones and all kinds of electronic products at ComputerHoy.com has left me with hundreds of these examples of evolution and improvement of products throughout their life cycle. Nevertheless, It has also left me testimonials of hundreds of serious bugs that the manufacturers have never corrected.…and that is the great drawback of this launch model.
This product evolution model in the hands of the user depends on the commitment of the manufacturers to the product and its users. In other words, the manufacturer undertakes to correct and adjust the problems that arise in the first months of the product’s life.
But if the manufacturer does not do his part, the result will be a disaster since the user has in his hand a device with faults that will never be corrected, giving rise to a bad user experience… and sure that of those, you will also have had some bad experience.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism