Why oh why are telephones so unutterably ugly, and uniformly grotesque? In particular, I'd like to know who does the market research for, or is involved in the design of cordless phones. They are revolting. Utterly utterly revolting. And so are the phones.
I bought a horrific old Panasonic a couple of years ago, and it's already got keys that don't work, so I'm in the market to replace it, and I'd be grateful to anyone who can show me a model that's worth looking at for more than 10 seconds or that you could have on a shelf without vomiting every time you walk past it. Here's what I think the standard design criteria are:
- Use Silver or Black.
- If you must use Silver AND Black, make sure they conspire to befuddle, and that the boundary between the two bears no sign of deliberate effort to please the eye.
- Use only the cheapest plastic available, and make sure that Walmart would be proud to display it next to their discount DVD cage and pre-school underpant combination display.
- Use retro Lucozade-Orange for backlighting of the display and buttons if Horsepiss-Yellow is unavailable.
- Ensure that sound quality is crap. If not possible, add the Hissmaster Clicktronic chipset from Naftel.
- Try to avoid convenient features such as phone-book sharing between handsets.
- Ensure that connectivity is crap.
- Make the phone as large as humanly possible. Throw in an antenna (be sure not to waste wires connecting it internally, but do not waste money making it removable).
- Ensure remaining battery time is never represented accurately.
- Never, ever, on pain of death and expulsion from the cordless phone community, put a decent or configurable ringtone on the unit.
Note that this is something that may be peculiar to the US market. In the UK I did find one or two phones that violated some of the above rules, but they weren't for sale to Chavs and Pikeys (that is, they were a tad delicate and only available in decent shops - not Debenhams). I truly believe that the cordless phone market may be entirely comprised of the Fatfuck Chavchump demographic - i.e. blind and lobotomised clothed lungfish from Oxford Street.
Please, if you know of a decent design of cordless phones, preferably available in the US, let me know. I shall be eternally grateful and may even use it to call you sometime.
Update: DMC points out
this example of a not-entirely-shabby phone, which she found in this month's Lucky magazine (whaa?). Although it still combines Lucozade and horse-piss, silver and black, it does have some redeeming features (e.g. shared phone-book) and isn't as dumpy and hideous as those other soap-bar Fisher-Price offerings.
