What's wrong with Motorola?

So I have my flashy new phone, the Motorola RAZR R3.  It looks beautiful.  It must have cost them a lot of money in research, design & manufacture.

 

When talking about phones to friends, the most common thing I hear is “but I’m used to the Nokia menus”.  Some people don’t have this problem, e.g. those using Siemens phones.

 

I had a Motorola a long time ago.  Motorola Startac.  It too was a slim phone.  It had a terrible user interface.  So many years on, I still can’t understand why Motorola are able to spend millions on sexy phone design, but can’t see the sense in making their phone easy to use.

 

The biggest example I have is:

- If a friend of mine has an Office number, a Mobile number and a Home number, I have to have separate entries for them in the phone book.

- When searching the phone book for a name, I can only search by the first character, and then I have to scroll.  For example, to find Martin, I have to first go to M, and then scroll past Marcus, Marianne, Mark…  and if I have more than one phone number for Marcus, then I have to scroll past Marcus (home), Marcus (office), Martin (mobile)……..  If I want to call ‘mum’ then I would start at N and then work backwards.  Man!

 

Motorola allow me to store 1000 phone numbers in my phone.  But in order to phone them it seems, I can only search by 1 character.  And then scroll.  And scroll.  If they’d put a thumbwheel like Blackberries have, then I could scroll quicker.  But no, I have to slowly slowly one by one scroll.  What a pain in the behind.

 

Not much more than a pretty face it seems, which makes the RAZR a poser’s phone.  Great.  Vanity at a price.

 

What’s wrong with Motorola?  Sure, design sells phones.  It tricked me for sure.  But in terms of getting friends to recommend phones, surely they realise that they have to be easy to use as well?  Someone over there is really missing a trick.  It’s like designing cars that look great but drive like crap.  Oh wait, that’s the American auto industry I just described…. Hehe

 

Thanks for the umbrella suggestion Micah BTW, I’ll pop down to the Nanjingdonglu branch of uniqlo when I have a chance.  I’m in HK for the next few weeks on business, so it’ll be when I get back.

 

Oh and interestingly, Barbarossa never got back in touch with me to apologise, explain, or even say hello about my giant umbrella incident.  The challenges in running a business if you ask me, are 1) what happens normally 2) what you do to avoid things going wrong 3) what you do when things do go wrong and 4) keeping your stakeholders (incl customers) sweet.

 

Maybe Barbarossa are happy enough with their passing tourist trade.  Or maybe they’re cocky enough that they have enough expat business and don’t need my custom.  Or maybe they have enough problems on their hands and management are already up to the eyeballs.  Or maybe management there just haven’t got the professionalism of service that I’ve grown accustomed to.  A combination of the above I daresay.