So my mom just got a new phone. A Nokia 3650. You know, the one with the outlandish rotary-layout keypad. And this finally replaced the trusty, reliable, and next-to-the-5110-perhaps-the-most-indestructible-phone-around Nokia 3530 which she had been using for ages now. In other words, she has finally entered the graphical interface age.

Problem: my mom’s pushing 70. And the entire concept of navigable graphics menus befuddles her no end.

“Here’s how you use it,” I explained in my slowest, preschool teacher voice. “You push this button up to move the highlight up, down to push it down, left to move it left… and center to click.”

She just stared blankly at the phone’s screen.

I was contemplating the use of hand puppets to get my message across, but I just had to give up. The entire concept of using a set of keys that can move a cursor around a graphical menu in two dimensions is just too much for her to absorb for now.

Us younger folks are the gaming generations, so we’ve taken it for granted that graphical user interfaces, whether for PCs or for phones, are so intuitive that any pedestrian can start using them on the fly. Like that scene in Star Trek IV when Scotty sees a 1980s-era Macintosh for the first time and starts clicking away at lightning speed to produce a chemical model for transparent aluminum in less than a minute. We (including Scotty) grew up with joysticks, gamepads and other interface devices, so a phone’s navipad is second nature to us.

For those who do not even know what a joystick is, however, the graphical user interface isn’t necessarily as friendly as we assume it to be. And it may take some time before these genteel folks get to understand the feedback process that goes into moving a controller and seeing something moving on a screen in response.

But I’m sure that my mom will hack it. Eventually. She did, after all, somehow manage to learn how to send text messages — after sending out several hundred pesos worth of text to the wrong people and to total strangers. So I’m sure that after a few thousand pesos worth of accidentally using GPRS, inadvertently downloading unwanted wallpapers, and calling up total strangers by mistake, she’ll eventually figure out the Nokia 3650’s navipad.

Eventually.

NEXT DAY UPDATE:

My mom switched back to her old phone.