Tuesday December 20, 2005

Motorola RAZR I liked my Sony Ericsson T616 for its Bluetooth connectivity, software design in general. Especially loved using Salling Clicker to flip slides. But the mechanical design was rickety, call quality and call handoff quality were poor, and there were times when I couldn't get the phone to turn on. The day finally came when it just wouldn't turn on at all

I scrambled to the Cingular store to get a RAZR phone for an upcoming trip.

My review of RAZR:

Awesome mechanical work. It is very robust without the creaking and groaning of the Sony. Has Bluetooth (I care about) and VGA camera (I don't care about). The software is poorly designed though. The Java stack is not standards-based so I can't run Clicker. The menu navigation is fast, but extremely nonintuitive and innefficient. Some examples:

• The nice display has enough room for 9 menu items, but only shows 4
• Address book doesn't support addresses, emails, or IMs.
• Calendar will not show notes about meetings
• There's no "profiles" feature to change ring behavior. To silence the phone you have to (noisily) reduce volume a step at a time till it's off.

So the first day I was convinced that I'd be returning the RAZR, but someone coached me through the undocumented ability to modify menu ordering and phonebook display. So now I'll probably keep it. I wish they'd support a standard Java stack so I can run Clicker. Pleeeeeeeeeease???

I work with 10 people here, any of whom could each solve all the above problems in a weekend's work. Is it really that hard for Motorola to figure that out?