Nokia, Nokia, Nokia, Nokia, Nokia, Sony Ericson, SPV, SPV C500, Motorola V3 (Silver, not black).

There is a theme here. I went for bigger smarter phones up to and including the SPV. That did everything; integrated with Outlook, ran a mini-MSN Messenger, supported MS Exchange directly as well as IMAP (My blog readership of one [Hi Mum] has probably died of boredom at this point)...

But you know, the moer complicated they got, the more problems I had. The SPV was great at most things, but to be honest, it really wasn't a very good phone. If it was busy doing something (probablly chatting to other SPVs via GPRS) it would refuse to answer incoming calls - I kid you not.

So, I went for Motorola. Come on - they have the slickest smartest adverts and the phone is, IMO, the most futuristic and good looking thing to ever nestle lovingly in my hand.

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Motorola have spent their entire salary budget on ergonomic design specialists and creative advertising gurus. They forgot to have somone think about how people use phones.

People like Microsoft spend a fortune with design companies looking at their applications. They (and lots of other people who design systems) make their software easier to use by grouping together similiar tasks or tasks that are performed at similiar times. Looking at tasks that are most commonly performed (whether you are in a word processor or using a phone) and making those tasks the easiest and quickest to get to is, well, common sense?

Unforunately, it's all too much for Motorola.

I know, todays blog entry really is a dull rant, but I have to get it off my chest.

Top hates about the V3 Phone:

1. It takes 13 button presses to activate Blue Tooth for my headset that is already paired to the phone. Please! I can make most my journeys in less time than it takes to turn the damn thing on.

2. Only one button press to access the phone book - yippee. Most phones I've had (SPVs, Sony Ericsson) allow you to select a name by just keying in the letters. So to find my house number, I type in H O U and I'm there. Because I've over 200 contacts (that's laziness in not deleting old numbers), I need to be able to narrow down the search. The letters HO gets 'Home (other home)', 'House' and several Hotels (I call them HOTEL X etc. - to group them together). So, HOU narrors the list down to a single number.

The Motorola? It only allows you to specify the first letter. So I go to Heather, then scroll past Hilary, Home, then Hospitals (I group them togehter as well) until I finally get to House.

A more obvious example. My GF (S) is the 13th entry in the S list. She doesn't understand that this is why I kept forgetting to call her; I'd start to search for her number and then fall asleep before I got to it...

To make matters worse, each entry is spread across multiple lines in the phone book. So, I have S's parent's home number, S's email address and her mobile. So, she actually occupies 3 lines, each of which I have to scroll past to get to Stefan's entry (not that I call him that often).

3. The text inbox is tiny. I've had it 3 weeks (I'm on my second phone and 3rd battery in that time), and it's warning me that it's nearly full. I had just over 500 texts on my SPV (I'm a hoarder) and it still begged for more.

On the up side, you can set mulitple alarms without filling your calender with bogus 5 minute entries, the screen and camera are good, the battery life is (when it isn't broken) quite good and it does syncronise with Outlook.

Anyway, I'll get used to it and at least it works well as a phone (see the comment about the SPV above). However, I'm dumbstruck at just how poor the Motorola phone software/system is; you'd really think that they were being advised on usability by a slightly dim frog.

Rant over. I feel cleansed, pure and refreshed. I had that all bottled up with no outlet. I gush forth and lo, life is good again. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

--eyepeasea--

And....

--pictureoftheday--

Lovely - Size does matter.

Working at Heathrow airport, I see lots and lots of pictures of the A380 on notice boards and things. Now... I'm not a plane freak, I don't stand on the perimeter road with my Air-band radio and notepad, but... This plane is just one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I can't explain it; it doesn't have the things I normally find attractive, but, well, it's captivating.