A while ago Joel Spolsky recieved a no obligation, free 3G service from Sprint - all expenses paid for 6 months. Well, it didn’t work out so well for Sprint, since the LG handset that they sent, plus the online movie/music services that Sprint provided weren’t up to scratch. And Joel didn’t exactly hold back on his opinion of the service.

I hadn’t seen anything more on it until today when Michael Mace posted an article about him being kicked out sorry - not having his service renewed. See the article: Mobile Opportunity: Sprint recalls an Ambassador

I havn’t tried any of the 3G services here in Australia and given the data costs, I’m not planning on it any time soon), but there’s certainly some opportunities to learn from Sprint’s failings here.

Certainly not all of it is Sprint’s fault - LG are the people who made the crappy interface, so they should certainly share some of the blame here.

To be perfectly honest (and at the risk of sounding biased) - I’ve never really liked any of the mobile interfaces — the closest any mobile company has come to a “nice” interface is Nokia.

All the buttons are predictable, and they’ve made an excellent decision to keep the interface fairly standard across their lineup. This means even if someone switches to a different Nokia phone - they can still figure out all the basic functionality: change ringtones, profiles, send messages, etc. Learn it once - apply everywhere.

It’s part of the reason why Windows and Mac OS have succeeded so well - they force all (or at the least, most) applications to have a very similar interface, and application developers are naturally encouraged to keep to the design model.