What phone should you buy your mum?
Got this in from Steve at iTAGG:
Would love peoples thoughts on buying a mobile for a parent for xmas. my mother is currently on a PAYG O2 sim, and will probably stick to PAYG, although am up for a different network. She wants a camera phone and would like calls, text and mms (send and receive). other than that she really doesnt want any of the skype, ringtones, sling or any of the multitude of crazy services that we all devour but jo-public really doesn’t need. just the chance to call, text and now mms the odd picture. So what are some nice simple parent-proof mobiles for me to buy her?
Ahh well I can answer this one based on what my brothers and I did for my mum. She came home one day expressing disgust with her Nokia 3330, saying that her friends all had snazzy looking flip phones.
So we went shopping online for some nicer looking handsets — and eventually settled on the RAZR V3x. She was able to try it out because Fraser, younger brother, had one.
She really liked the big keys and the big screen. She really likes using the camera too. It’s been a big success.
What would you recommend for Steve’s mum?
Have you recently bought a handset for your mum? If so, which one and what was your purchasing criteria?
My mum bought a Nokia 2650, as I recommended. I told her to get a clamshell phone because she then didn’t have to worry about it being keylocked when in her bag. I also told her to get a Nokia or Sony Ericsson as their user interfaces are more intuitive to Danes (yes, we’re Danish) - something I know for a fact after having worked in the mobile business for some years. People like the design of Samsung and Motorola, but get really annoyed with the user interface.
In the end, the 2650 was cheap and came with a reasonable PAYG solution from the operator Tele2.
Note: my mum never had a mobile before, so I wanted to start out very basic not to scare her.
Posted by Kinnie on December 12th, 2006 at 12:31 am.