We would prefer that it look, and act, more like a computer application. In particular, we find RealPhone's lack of intelligence to be most unappealing . RealPhone can do more than a real telephone without breaking the visual metaphor. By modeling it after a real phone, IBM has unnecessarily limited its functionality . For example, the number of speed dial numbers on a real phone is limited by the size of the phone and economics.
Virtual phones have no such limit.
They could simply have listed the names and let the user click on the desired name to call. Unfortunately, the real-world metaphor would not support such categorization, so IBM left it out of the application. Maybe the phones at IBM have drawers underneath them, but not one of the phones we've ever used had a drawer. So much for the real-world metaphor. The resultant problem is that the user is provided no indication of how to add a name to the database, nor how to configure a speed dial button.