US telecom provider Sprint will start to offer free, in-store smartphone training to its customers, because 21 percent of the company's smartphone buyers come back to the store to return the phone or to seek help in setting it up and learning to use it (NYT, smartphone.biz, Sprint). Initially the Ready Now program will only run in Sprint's own stores, but in time will spread to independent retail stores as well. Sprint has hired extra employees for every store to handle the workload.

Who will pay?
Anyone wants to put a number on what that might cost? And it makes you wonder: does Sprint oblige the handset manufacturers to chip in as well? And, more interestingly, do they require a higher contribution from manufacturers of handsets that cause more user questions and product returns? I know I would.

Fixing a bad design in the store
The article on smartphone.biz points out two possible causes for the large number of complaints and returns:

This could be a reflection on the technical competence of the average purchaser of today’s function-packed smartphones. Or it could be that retailers and manufacturers aren’t doing enough to explain how new handsets operate.

In short: either the users are too dumb for today's multi-multi-tasking smartphones, or they don't get enough training. I find this line of reasoning tricky, as it points to only one alleged source of the problems: the lack of technical savvyness of the user (more instructions means fixing that lack). The article fails to mention the other (real) source of the problem; the one that you can change without expensive user training: the unusable handset and its configuration. As Dave Gustafson of unpressablebuttons pointed out, what's new about the iPhone are not the features, but it's that you (Mr. or Mrs. Average User) can actually get these features to work. Something that some CEOs still fail to notice. If Sprint wants to solve the root cause of this problem, it should require its handset suppliers to deliver smartphones that make the users feel smart, instead of handsets that outsmart its users. Then, in addition Sprint could take care that configuring the phones to work on their network would become easier, which is what the Ready Now program is about.

Configuring MMS
A lesson about the effects of poor setup of handsets can be learned from MMS. When MMS - the once would be follow up to SMS (text messaging) - first came on the market in Europe, and I wanted to try it out on my newly purchased phone, I got a prompt: 'configure data access provider'. When I finally managed to do that, it turned that to send an MMS I had to go through a 14-step dialogue. Now where's the fun in that? A lesson T-mobile learned from that is to allow its users to receive phone settings via an SMS message that can be sent from their wireless configurator website. This is necessary, because phones that are sold in retail stores are not configured for the network of the provider you are going use the phone on.

But the bottom line is that both countermeasures - an online configuration page and extra support in stores - are sympathetic attempts at fixing a problem that should not be there.