Error: overly technical speak

I love my iPhone. It’s intuitive, informative, entertaining and keeps me in touch with both work and play. According to Apple, about 90,000,000 iPhones have sold so far, and millions more own similar incarnations.

But I’ve got a beef with it. A small but regular niggle. Every day, about two or three times a day I get this message:

It means I can’t get onto the internet (and shouldn’t ‘could not’ be ‘can’t’?). A small thing, but a quick search online revealed lots of confused customers asking what this means. It got me thinking about the way our technology communicates with us. Phone manufacturers get the brand, features and benefits right, but when it comes to notification messages they revert to the language of developers and manufacturers.

Here are some other gems: ‘This accessory is not optimized for this iPhone. You may experience noise caused by mobile interference and a decrease in mobile signal strength’

‘Client/server conversion error’, HTC

‘Connected by DROID on Verizon Wireless’

‘Not ready for use. Activation will be notified later’, Vodafone 360

Even the incidental messages affect our user experience, especially when we’re faced with them every day.