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?