My Motorola Cell Phone Sucks

Here are just a few reasons why my Motorola i760 cell phone sucks.

1. About 90% of the time when I plug the phone into its charger, the phone turns off by itself in about an hour, for no good reason.

2. It makes an awful buzzing/clicking interference noise in the speakers of any nearby stereo, especially when it’s ringing, about to ring, or in use.  This is actually true of all GSM phones though, apparently:

Quoting wikipedia:

A nearby GSM handset is usually the source of the "dit dit dit, dit dit dit, dit dit dit" signal that can be heard from time to time on home stereo systems, televisions, computers, and personal music devices.  When these audio devices are in the near field of the GSM handset, the radio signal is strong enough that the solid state amplifiers in the audio chain function as a detector.  The clicking noise itself represents the power bursts that carry the TDMA signal.  These signals have been known to interfere with other electronic devices, such as car stereos and portable audio players.

3. Its "Recent Calls" feature doesn’t work properly.  This is true of all Motorola phones I’ve used (3 different ones).  Let’s say you’ve recently received (but missed) the following 5 calls:

3:00 PM - Client Bob
3:20 PM - Mom
3:30 PM - Client Bob
3:45 PM - Wife
4:00 PM - Client Bob

A "Recent Calls" list would display exactly that, though probably with the times on a separate screen (which is dumb).  But here’s what the phone actually displays:

3:20 PM - Mom
3:45 PM - Wife
4:00 PM - Client Bob

So you have no idea that your maniacal Client Bob actually called you 3 times in the past hour.  The fact is, this feature is a "Recent Callers" list, not a "Recent Calls" list.  The feature actually implemented is much less useful, and it’s made even worse by the fact that it’s incorrectly titled.

4. The address book only lets you enter 20 characters in the "Name" field.  20 characters isn’t even enough for many people’s first and last names; forget about including an extra word or two to indicate who the person is (business name?  location?  something to indicate their affiliation with you?) -- that would just be too darn useful.  It says I currently have 127 slots in use and 473 free, so it clearly has enough memory to spare a few extra letters on each entry.

5. The alarm feature (under "Datebook") is totally lame.  It won’t turn the phone on to sound the alarm, which means you can’t turn the phone off if you want to use the alarm (for, say, an ALARM clock in the morning), which means someone can call you in the middle of the night and wake you up.  This could be fixed by setting the phone to "silent" overnight, except for another boneheaded feature: the alarm won’t go off if the phone is set to silent.

6. Miscellaneous inconsistencies, for example: if you go to the messages screen and highlight "voice mail", you can’t hit the "call" button to call it; you have to hit the "OK" button.  But if you highlight the "voice mail" item in the "Recent Calls" list, the opposite is true: "OK" doesn’t call it, but the "call" button does.

Update: more reasons to hate this friggin’ phone:

7. OK, so I can send an IM to my phone from AIM by using the phone number (starting with "+1") as the screenname.  That’s cool.  And I can send an email to my phone by sending it to phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com -- cool, and I can even attach photos -- really cool!  But can I set one of my own photos as the wallpaper (background image) on the phone?  No, of course not!  Only "official" images (read: ones that you purchase from Sprint/Nextel) can be used as wallpaper.  Just another example of the phone networks artificially limiting the phone hardware’s capabilities to extract more money out of us.  Friggin’ crooks.