Razr Annoyances
.My cellphone is a Motorola Razr, and I’ve mostly been happy with it. I’m not exactly a cellphone power user, its form factor is good, it’s quad-band, and in general is mostly fine. But there are some things about it that are very irritating.
The first thing is the text messaging memory allocation. Right now, once I hit about 100 text messages total (inbox plus outbox), it starts complaining about a lack of memory. That, in itself, is irritating… it’s a 2006 device! How can it not have enough memory to store thousands and thousands of messages?
This is compounded by other area where usability is lacking. First off: it can’t store more than a hundred text messages, but in a year I’ve barely hit 10% of my allocation for photos? And furthermore, there’s no easy way to change that allocation so that I can put all that memory to use? That it’s not shared memory is pretty bad, but that it’s set in place is just wrong.
The second compounding error: there appears to be no way, in the Motorola Phone Tools that came with it, to manage the text messages while connected to a PC. Whose idea was that? Who decided that it made sense to let you get photos and ringtones but not your text messages? Even without transferring them, the ability to delete them en masse would be nice. There’s a “cleanup” option (in the phone UI, not the PC UI), but since I want to store specific older text messages, it’s not something I want to use.
It just seems so obvious that everything on the phone should be accessible and manageable via a computer connection.
Oh, and that goes for the audio recordings, too—you can record notes (or whatever audio) with the Razr, but apparently there is no way at all to get those recordings off the phone. Same stupidity, really, just forgetting that as a digital device it should be a lot more manageable via a digital connection.
I haven’t been too impressed with the synching options, but I’m prepared to concede that they might be due to trying to work with various proprietary solutions… they should just use vCard.