Sometimes a lack of change is disappointing

In a recent blog post I talked about how people don’t like change. Now find myself writing about the exact opposite!

I’d also like to clarify my last blog post. There are times when change is welcomed by a lot of people and in the software world that’s where the change is that something that was clearly not good enough before is improved and made to work either properly or much better. I think it’s when people are “satisfied” with the status quo that the change causes consternation.

Personally I think I’m much more open to change than most people – certainly in software and websites that I use. However, there are times when I find a lack of change disappointing. One instance of this is with smartphones.

Not very many years ago, getting a new phone was an exciting experience. For the first few weeks I would be discovering how it worked and how things were different to the last phone. Every few days I’d find a new feature or something and would think “wow, this is fantastic” but that all changed with the advent of the iPhone and Android phones.

I got my first Android phone about 3 years ago and was amazed by it. I loved installing new apps and playing about with settings to get it setup just the way I wanted (I am a techie after all!) and I’m now onto my second Android phone.

About a month ago I was excited to receive a notification on the phone to tell me that there was a system update available for me. I knew this was the latest version of the Android operating system for my phone. This was big news indeed (I did mention I’m a sad techie didn’t I?).

The problem was that I did the update and rebooted the phone and was…………. erm…………. well…………. pretty unimpressed really. It turns out that Android 4.0 looks very much like Android 2.3 that I had before. It’s a bit slicker and there are some new bits but nothing much.

This made me think about when I got my second shiny new Android phone. When I think back I remember I felt distinctly underwhelmed that time too because apart from a bigger screen and it being a bit faster, there wasn’t a fat lot of difference between that and my first Android phone.

The same can be said of a lot of devices these days. The latest iPhone or iPad might have a better display, a nicer camera or be a bit faster but apart from that, it looks and works exactly the same.

The trade off to this of course is familiarity and that means that as soon as you do get the shiny new device you can work it and know where everything is. Overall that’s probably a good thing but it has taken some of the fun out of it for me!