I mentioned back in my iPhone post about how my first generation RAZR was on its last legs and I was planning on replacing it, and sure enough I did. Twice, even.
As I said back then, all I need is a phone. I have a Blackberry for e-mail and an iPod for music/video, so all I care about is a phone, preferably one that looks cool. I decided to go with the Cingular 3125 (also known as the HTC Star Trek). It seemed to fit the bill: nice QVGA screen, big, friendly buttons, roughly the same size as the RAZR when closed, but larger when open. Plus it has a cool looking analog clock on the front when closed. So I got the thing and started playing around with it. That’s when the problems first started.
It runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone Edition (mmm…rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), which means it won’t natively sync with a Mac. I knew that was going to be an issue in advance, so I wasn’t really bothered by that. That’s what the Missing Sync is for, after all. But even with that extra software, I couldn’t sync over Bluetooth. Something about not supporting external Bluetooth adapters. But that’s not a huge issue, really. Just an inconvenience.
My next issue was with the screen that shows up when you open the phone (referred to by Windows Mobile as the “home screen”). I like a nice, simple interface, preferably with a cool image behind it. But Windows Mobile throws all kinds of crazy crap on the screen. You can select from a few different options, but they all suck. Even the simplest of the lot has all kinds of obtuse and indecipherable icons. I’d have happily RTFM’d, but naturally, Cingular didn’t give me one.
But that’s still not a dealbreaker. There’s software out there that lets you remove crap from the homescreen, so after several headbeating hours, I finally had something that was at least slightly acceptable. Of course, that’s when the real headaches started.
My first big problem was because I’ve been spoiled by Motorola. Motorola phones (at least the ones I’ve had over the years), will automatically switch to an audible ring when the phone is plugged in and then back to vibrate when unplugged (if you set it that way, anyway). Windows Mobile has no such functionality. Not really, anyway. It does let you set a profile that’s triggered when you connect an auto kit, but that’s it. Again, I found third party software to get around this…but only a little. There’s a program out there that will automatically change the ring based on calendar entries. So I can set it to vibrate when I’m at work, but not when I’m home. And that’s fine, but it’s a bit of a kludge. I also discovered that most third party software requires a Windows PC with ActiveSync installed. So even though I had the Missing Sync on my Mac, I still had to use my Windows machine. And naturally when I did that it renamed my phone “WM_Heather” because I was logged in as Heather on the Windows machine (this despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I changed that during the install process). But again, that’s a minor gripe.
The real dealbreaker came when I discovered that if I went into an area with no service (like say a subway) and then into an area with service (pretty much everywhere else) it wouldn’t get a signal back. And even worse, it wouldn’t tell me if I got any voicemail unless I rebooted the phone. I mean, really, WTF? That basically made the phone useless to me, as like any New Yorker, I’m in and out of subways all the time.
There were other annoyances as well…Windows Mobile 5 will automatically multitask unless you quit each application manually. I can understand that being useful for a PDA, but I use this purely as a phone. I actually found myself running out of memory because I forgot to quit applications. In more than one case, I had to open the Task Manager (yep, there’s a Task Manager) and force quit programs. Also annoying: while this phone supports Java apps (like Chessmaster, the only game I wanted to put on there), it only shows them in the “Midlet Manager” and not in the same place as all your other apps.
After ten days of this crap, I gave up. I called Cingular and told them I hated this thing and wanted to switch. And so I’ve got a brand new Motorola RAZR V3xx, a sleek phone that’s a full two Xes newer than my previous one. I’ll have it in a couple of days, and I eagerly await being able to send this Windows-powered frustration machine back to the depths of hell from whence it came.
The funny thing is how relatively simple my needs are. I mean, all I really should care about in a phone is how it looks, since I don’t really do anything but talk on the damn thing. But while my Windows Mobile thing might work if I used the calendar or web browser or pocket excel (with a screen that size, I can’t imagine why I would want to do any of those things), it just wasn’t a good phone. I won’t miss this in the slightest.
As if I haven’t already provided enough excuses for the slowdown around here, I’ve got another one: I’m back in school. For a while now I’ve wanted to get a masters degree, preferably in something at least slightly related to my career (a degree in philosophy and religion may be a good conversation starter, but it doesn’t do much for my resume), but my extremely hectic schedule hasn’t really allowed for much flexibility.
