Why don't I shave with a RAZR?

I did another wild thing and swapped cell phones with my girlfriend for a week. Or two.


And here's my MOTOROLA RAZR UI analysis.

Here I go again, focusing only on points which could be improved, given due attention to detail and a good sense of usability.

May I call it my "6 steps to make RAZR sharper" guide? :)

Point 1. Right-to-Left.

Okay, this is very obvious for everybody. MOTO sticks to its tradition (against everybody else) of putting affirmative buttons on the right, negative action button on the left. It would have been memorizable, had they also chose to reverse the red&green call buttons. But they had not! So to Accept a Call, bear to left. But to Accept an Action, bear to the opposite side :)

Point 2. Scrolling.

MOTO has it's own way of fast scrolling. You do it by pressing numbers! So 1-2-3-ish, from early 80s era! Yes, you need to estimate on the numbers of lines you don't even see!
Or else - press'n'hold'n'wait while watching the lines slowly click by, along with the precious seconds of your life.
A simple scroll acceleration after a certain amount of press time would be so much better!

Point 3. Personal Tones.

If you set a personal call tone, say, for a friend, you also get it for the SMS from the friend.

So, setting and mp3 tune gives you whole lotta noiz at SMS arrival! Fun fun fun!

(Some SMS are sent at night, not to disturb with a call and a ring. Or across timezones.)

Point 4. Your e-mail is too long and will be deleted.

I know it sounds funny but it's not so when you wait for an important e-mail, and you finally get it, and you see:

Looks like some arhitecture limitation?

Point 5. Bleeps and moans.

The phone uses sound signals profusely.

It will not let you ignore an unread message, unanswered call, low battery.

You're better off fix it now or switch off sound.

There should have been an option to turn off such signals, akin to Service Jingle and others, that are controlled in Settings - Network.

Point 6. No repeated alarms.

You may set the alarms only as 1-time events.

Minor things:

There's a menu called Initial Settings. Hmm? Sounds like a place you only go once you turn it on the very first time. The right wording would be Basic Settings. Anyway, the only way to set up text entry modes is when you go to a place where you can enter some text and there you may invoke a context menu with Entry Mode and Entry Setup.

Oh, and don't forget! Your settings may change depending on the text field settings -try to go to e-mail setup and you'll see that now dot is not where it was, but @ ate it's lunch.

Themes are not in Settings - Phone, but are in Multimedia menu.

Okay, maybe 2 weeks was not enough to adapt myself? My answer is - the phone has to be supportive, not distractive.

All-in-all, I think this phone has rather impressive and solid UI, it is totally less cumbersome than on smartphones - and here we get to the point - either MOTO pays more attention or ... the phone is plainly simpler than the smartphones.

Whichever you think matters more in the case?

Another "wild" idea

Feeling unsafe out in the street?

Need additional protection against intruders?

Don't have a gun but like to surprise people?

Your cellphone might have you covered!

My idea is quite shocking - to built an electric shocker into a cellphone.

The back cover would be made of metal, connected to a circuit that would prevent accidental activation against your own ear! :) There are serious radio part compatibility implications, of course.

Otherwise we could have seen it already, I guess. :)

Pardon the crudeness of the idea, but it could really be helpful... say, for women :)

Wildcard Caller ID idea

Hi Experts,
I'm back with an idea of a little neat feature for Symbian (and possibly others) cell phones.
The idea is simple - to make user's life easier by recognizing (via Caller ID) groups of numbers matching a wildcard, not just the whole exact number of a Contact. Let me show you how.
You have Contacts in your cellphone's Address book. The phone matches the incoming CLI (Caller Line ID) of the caller to a number in the Contacts. But what if you want to identify a group of numbers?
This could be useful, for instance, to quickly see from which network (or city) you are being called, or from which company. It's no secret that many companies get pools of consecutive telephone numbers, so you could be quickly seeing from which company you get the call even without filling your Address Book with all employees' numbers.
Business customers may be interested in this feature. It would be a beneficial, value-adding feature for a platform, and a marketing differentiator, to provide a new type of contacts in the phone's address book - a template (wildcard) contact.

Usage example 1: Let's say I have the following entries:
+74955556666 Lena (BeeLine), +16457236546 John, +791687458755 Lena (MTS).

What if I could enter Address Book records like
+7916* MTS, +1* USA, +7903* BeeLine, +749512388## Forbes, +7812* St.Petersburg ?

Like in UNIX wildcards,
* (star) stands here for any number of any digits, # (mesh) stands for any single digit.

Usage Example 2:

I was 'phone-abused' by a real estate agency in Moscow - they have lots of employees in many offices, calling in from their office phones, all from the same pool +7495363####. I wasted lots of time answering their calls, telling them I "wrong number" and so on. They seem to have had wrong number of a client written down. Had I had this template contacts feature in my phone, I would have not need to squinch my eyes trying to see first digits and decide if I need to pick up.

Usage Example 3.

When late at night someone calls you from abroad on an important mission, it would be nice to see it's from another country (a word "Germany" shown) instead of trying to wake up and see if the first digits are +49.

Sounds good? Might be even better! (options)

"Exact match" means the current way of doing things - all numbers match.
"Wildcard match" means the new, group match.

A cellphone shows not only the exact match, but also the next worst match from a wildcard entries. And it could even highlight the part of incoming number that matches a wildcard, with a different color!

This gives a user, at a quick glance, a good idea of who might call, or where from, without the annoying deciphering of the caller ID by himself. If there's no exact match, the call history shows just the full number. If there's an exact match, and a worse match, the call history logs the 2 longest matches. 

Please tell me what you think.