When Saturday Night Live decides to make fun of Verizon, there’s something deeply satisfying about it. See if you agree when you watch this skit that aired Saturday night on SNL, poking fun at the alphabet soup and numerical nightmare that you’ll find yourself embroiled within if you decide to buy a connected device.
Unless you’re an absolute expert about smartphones and 3G and 4G and all the various protocols and model numbers and powerful sounding names attached to such products, you might feel lost if you find yourself inside a store like this. Whew! Don’t feel bad. It’s complicated. Many people have no idea what kind of connectivity they have.
We run into the same problem when reviewing smartphones, especially when we’re trying to describe how fast a certain smartphone or tablet is when using 4G LTE. It’s fertile ground for deliberate confusion on the part of Verizon and other cellphone carriers, because wireless connectivity can vary from block to block, and even from room to room in your house.
In addition to the plethora of connectivity confusion, we’re especially amused by this video’s skewering of the barrage of choices when it comes to smartphones. Because there are so many different handsets from which to choose, many consumers are tempted to throw up their hands and give up, keeping the cellphone they’re using now.
When presented with too many choices, people are less likely to choose anything. In a classic Columbia University study of consumer choice, when given a choice of six flavors of jam in a supermarket taste test, people were 10 times more likely to buy one than if they were given a choice of 24 flavors.
Now think about this in the context of buying a smartphone: As of today, Samsung has an absurd 134 cellphone choices on its website. How likely is a novice going to choose one of these, or just give up and keep the cellphone he’s using now, or make a snap decision based on getting out of the store as quickly as possible? Maybe Apple is onto something with its single smartphone brand name: iPhone.
[Mashable]
