My old, unreliable mobile phone died a couple of days ago, and I needed to buy a replacement. I’m not able to upgrade my phone for another 2 months so I decided to buy a pay-as-you-go phone and just slip my SIM into it (same network, no issues with locking). People who know me, will understand that I have a liking for flip-phones, so I went for the Motorola V3 (Razr). Aargh! christ, but the phonebook is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever come across. I understand this misbegotten need to have the phone book maintain some compatibility with the SIM, but for christ’s sake, they need to get their act together on this. Practically every contact in my phone book has two entries, in fact most have 3. On the motorola phone book every contact is a separate entry on the person list. This means I have to wade through 2+ entries per person to scroll from one person to the next. Factor in that I store people’s full names on the phone, in surname order, wading through the 9 Shanahan’s in the book takes a long time. It always integrates the SIM contacts onto the phone book. There is no visible option to disable this ‘feature’ (my SIM contacts always were a backup of my phone entries), so I end up with loads of duplicates (or purge my SIM). I can’t send my entire contact details to someone, I have to send it piece by piece. It shows the email addresses interspersed with the phone numbers which is pointless most of the time.
The next complaint is really a bit of a click-fascist thing. You know what I mean by this – it just seems to take an extra click or two to perform some tasks. Just enough to annoy perceptibly.
Then there’s the syncing software. Following the really annoying splash screen – slow, irritating and serving no purpose, we are presented with a rendering of my phone on the bottom right corner of the screen, a bunch of icons and no idea what does what without mousing over one of the icons and seeing what it does, based on the tooltip! Come on people, tooltips cannot replace text! Apparently I can dial numbers from the number pad (never would have guessed at that). The only way to pop up the menu is to hit a box that’s about 20 pixels square, replicating the menu button on the phone itself. Too small to hit easily, and there is no keyboard navigation, unless you can guess at the magic hotkeys. Most of the hard work is farmed off to other applications, none of which share details of the current state of the phone (contacts, calendar), each sub-application launch causes the data to be re-read, which takes ~30 seconds each. None of these sub-applications are keyboard navigable (bugbear of mine). Quitting the application requires either clicking on the really small off switch, or doing the acme Alt+F4 close the window trick. Practically everything visual about this application could do with a rewrite.
On the plus side, it does synchronize, which is it’s primary role, but I just wish it wasn’t so annoying about it.
Badly implemented phonebook aside, practically everything else about the phone is good. It’s small, neat and call quality is great. I’ve not tested the bluetooth functionality very much so I can’t say either way on it. Over all, I’d consider it a good replacement phone, but unless something good happens with the phone book, I’m not planning on buying another Motorola phone in the forseeable future after this one.
Now if only I could make my own phone book. I wonder if it’s even possible on these kinds of phone. Maybe I should check this out.