Brand allegiance: possible. Habit: definitely. As Jared Spool pointed out in an amusing article once, if you wake up one morning and some well meaning person has moved all your towels to “more logical” places in your house, you’ll be furious – simply because they are not where you are used to having them. The towels might indeed be in a better places. But just getting used to the change is an annoyance.

But still – the fact there there are no keys dedicated to calling or hanging up, and two keys dedicated to going back seems like a strange design decision. And even though I have now had the phone for a year, the design issue still persists. I no longer hang up calls because I know that doing so will almost certainly invoke the main menu. I rely on the other party to hang up. (Easy for them if they have a Nokia).

How about we split the difference: one fixed go-back button (instead of two) and one fixed call/hang-up button (instead of none)?

Harry’s point about brand allegiance is interesting though: I’ve had two of these K800is and a K750i before that, so it’s fair to say I have strong allegiance to the SE brand. In fact, I rarely look at any other phone. My girlfriend on the other hand doesn’t get on at all well with my SE and has never owned anything but a Nokia.

We almost always found that, for nokia users in particular, preferred brand took on a strong halo effect. This was a few years ago, though.

We would typically screen for a wide range of brand allegiances to avoid skew.