A few hints for mobile application developers
First, a hint for the operating system developers. The battery meter should always accurately reflect the status of the battery. There is no reason why it should be off. You can poll the battery every minute with minimal CPU load. There shouldn’t be a situation like I had this weekend where my Treo’s battery read half power then died overnight (I wasn’t running anything on it).
Next, if you develop a mobile application, there are two things that you should always show: (1) the RF signal strength meter and (2) the time. The first should be obvious. If my data transfer is hung and poor RF coverage is why, let me figure that out from the meter rather than having to infer it. The second is because I gave up carrying a watch 10 years ago - my cell phone is my watch. If the phone does not have a separate screen for a clock, you should always show the clock on the mail screen. This way, I don’t have to navigate a few screens away and back when I want to know the time.
Finally, use indications of progress. Due to the inherently unreliable nature of wireless networks, my data transfer might slow down or stop altogether. When this happens I don’t want the phone to show me a blank screen for a minute while it is trying to recover. Tell me something intelligent, such as “retrying” or show a progress bar and some indication of liveness. Otherwise I might think that the phone has hung and decide to reboot it.