New cell phone woes

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My two-year contract was up…time for a new phone! I love Motorola, always have. My last 2 phones have been Motorola and I’ve had zero problems with either. I loved the customizable screens and general feel and look of the phones.

So, as I peruse the options available to me, I am immediately drawn to the Krazr.
Motorola? - check
Cool colour? - check
buttons in the same place? - check
has a camera, speakerphone, and bluetooth? - check
Plays music - bonus!

I’m a hands-on person…I want to truly feel whether this phone will be right for me. Not one to rush into something, I ask around to see if anyone I know has one. Turns out my uncle does, so I play with it, take pictures, test the speakerphone, play some music…and I love the phone. It’s small, but I’ll get used to that. The laser-cut keypad doesn’t seem as bad as I thought. I text a lot, so ease of use is important.
Notice how I said I text a lot…

My grandmother buys one…I play around with hers and still like it. I even found [thread=404418]a thread[/thread] here about KRZRs and everyone liked theirs, **wasson ** and **flyingdragon ** even saying they text 15 times a day and it’s fantastic.

So I sign up for another 2 year agreement. My camera arrived today.

And I find out, while trying to add contacts, that the default text entry method is the excruciatingly slow ABC (tap once for a, twice for b, thrice for c, etc.).
iTap - which guesses what the word might be and inserts it so you can text much quicker - is available. BUT…you have to change the entry method from ABC to iTap every single time you text. Every time you type. Every time you add a contact. Every time you rename a photo. It’s a small thing, but c’mon, Motorola! iTap stayed default in my last phone, why not do the same for this? A 30 minute call to support in India somewhere reveals that…the KRZR is not set up for changing default entry method.

On a smaller note, I got a Motorola because the features will damn near identical. I like always having ringtones to the left, and messages to the right, and recent calls up. With the KRZR I can’t put exactly what I want where I want it. I can put some, but not all. I have to hit 3 more buttons to get to where I want to be, and there are less shortcuts.

I shouldn’t expect perfection, but I feel shafted. Something as simple as default entry method?

Stpd KRZR.

2

I have a SLVR, and had to change the messaging options on my phone. Have you tried hitting the center soft key to get into options while composing a message, and then going to Entry Setup, and changing the default to iTap English (I presume)?

3

If it makes you feel better, your phone has got to be better than my Samsung.

A few examples:

When you’re several levels deep in a menu, you cannot go up one level. You have to go back to the very beginning.

The alarm can only be turned off by opening the phone and pressing a particular button. Any other action, including accidently tapping the volume control on the outside or any other button will snooze the alarm. Once this has happened, the alarm will sound again in 10 min. no matter what you do. You can turn off the alarm, or even turn off the goddamn phone, and it will still wake up and sound the alarm in 10 min.

It has three folders: photos, my photos, and my pictures with very little apparent difference other than to annoy users.

One of the normal advantages of a clamshell phone is that you don’t have to lock the keypad. Not so with this POS. If you leave it unlocked in your pocket it will take a dozen photos, clog the memory, and prevent reception of text messages–messages which cannot be deleted except by a minutes-long process that prevents any other use of the phone.

It takes four steps on voicemail to get to the time of the call (which I suppose I could probably change if I knew how).

The list goes on…

4

This is why I like my Treo.

Default text entry method: An actual keyboard. A bright backlit one, at that.

Alarms: On-screen buttons to snooze or dismiss. Admittedly though, in the bleary-eyed state of half sleep, their labels might as well be written in Klingon and I’ve more than once dismissed when I meant to snooze.

Keyboard lock: Yep. I don’t use it though – which at least once ended up dialing my home phone several times, much to the confusion and consternation of my wife. I just get annoyed having to disable the lock every time I turn the phone on. At least it didn’t dial some random number in Wales…

Voicemail: Hold 1 for 3 seconds. (I can add applications or functions to other keys to quicklaunch them this way, too.)

Camera, speakerphone, bluetooth, music, movies, games, apps – check.

It does have problems with MP3 ringtones though. You need to use a ringtone program like Ringo, but it’s buggy and doesn’t always work, which results in missed calls. The weird thing is that I can copy an MP3 into the Treo’s internal ringtone library and it will play, but it won’t play anything larger than 64k, and if it’s larger than 64k, it will only play the first 64k. :stuck_out_tongue:

I like Motorola phones – I started with a 550 and had a Razr for a short time, and they worked well, but I can’t stand texting on a numeric keypad regardless of the input style. The keyboard is what really sells me on the Treo.

5

I will try that and get back to you. If it works, I’m calling customer service to tell them!

You know, I really liked the Blackberry, from what I saw. But I don’t need internet, and I couldn’t justify spending another $25 a month.
I really liked it, though…

6

I have a Samsung too and these are my exact gripes. Oh, and about texting, my defaults to the iTap style which drives me crazy and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to backspace and delete the last letter.

I almost never text so when I do I want it to be easy or at least easier than this.

7

I have a dedicated PDA for the internet, should I want it. Plus, the Treo fails at Internet. Blazer is a joke. Opera Mobile can be made to work on the Treo though, but again – don’t much care. My PDA does VGA, which is a hell of a lot more suitable for browsing than a dinky 2" 320x320 screen. I just wish it had a keyboard. :slight_smile:

8

OK, I got texting to stay on predictive iTap mode. I figured it out, partly due to chaoticbear. Thanks!

And the phone is growing on me. :slight_smile:

9

Hooray! I want a KRZR really badly, but my provider doesn’t carry the one with the touch buttons on the outside, and that’s the only reason I want it. I don’t have any music on my SLVR anyway.

10

I’m amused by your text entry gripe, because one of the things that annoyed me about my old RAZR was that the default text input mode for contacts was T9 rather than ABC. What are the odds that my friends’ and family’s names are going to be in the dictionary?

11

Walrus, I’m just lazy. :slight_smile:

12

I can understand lazy, but, how does it possibly help?

Unless you just give up and accept dictionary words. I actually have entries in my phone where people’s last names are just whatever the dictionary decided it could be and I didn’t bother to change it. I thought it was kind of fun for a while, to have Andy Machine and Nick Ghetto in my contacts.

13

I love my BlackBerry. I never knew love until Pearl.
Yes, I’m posting from it, too.

14

I use it more for texting than adding contacts. Entering long words like ‘tomorrow’, ‘yesterday’, ‘weekend’, and ‘understand’ are a lot quicker.
I don’t abbreviate my messages. “no ths wknd nt gud 4 me, cn born ultmtm fri n thn goin campn” makes me scream.

It was so hard to type that…