Now I got myself started!

by Christopher Paul on August 25, 2006

I got my self all riled up with that last post!  I started out telling everyone I began using Flock on Windows XP again and it ended up getting me pissed off at things that don’t work.  I’m IM’ing with my best friend talking about mobile phones and, somehow, it let me to ranting about shit not working again!

See, he got a new phone.  A cool new Linux based phone from Motorola and he’s loving it so far.  He always does his research on things like this and he’s usually happy with his purchases (Although the RAZR didn’t last long 😉 ).  Anyway, I’m interested in this phone, myself, because I’m not happy with my SLVR either.

Don’t get me wrong, the SLVR is a good phone.  It dials all the numbers well enough and the calls sound good; I’ve never complained that the reception is bad – its rather good for Cingular, really.  But the iTunes thing doesn’t work perfectly; some songs don’t play right and with some songs, the art work is wrong.  Every now and then, I need to restart the phone to fix some speaker/microphone problems.  Oh, and you know the deal with the SLVR… only 100 songs without hacking it.

And I don’t want to hack it to get 1000+ songs on there.  And I don’t want to reboot the phone to fix the speaker.  I certainly expect all the songs I copy to it play perfectly.  The artwork thing I can careless about because I can hear the song to tell what it is – I don’t need the cover art to identify the song so its only a minor annoyance.  But the point is that it doesn’t work like its supposed to and I want it to work the way it was marketed and presumably programmed (even if it was done poorly).  The SLVR isn’t my first Cingular phone that didn’t work the way I expected, however.

I signed up for the service when I got the MPx220.  Its a Windows Mobile phone that I liked for about 45 days.  It needed a reboot almost every other day.  The speakers sucked and it would turn off at random; I fixed that last one by folding a post-it note between the phone and battery to force the contacts closer to one another because they sometimes separated).  The only thing that I liked about the phone was the reason I got it: perfect synchronization between MS Outlook and the phone.  Dialing worked well too and as I dialed the numbers or the letters with the keypad, the right contacts came up; selecting the right contact was just as easy with the dial pad.

So the MPx220 sucked.  The SLVR sucks.  I’ve tried the T-Mobile MDA , too.  IT SUCKS WORSE THAN THE MPX220!!  The rebooting doesn’t happen as often but I still have to do it.  Dialing sucks because you need to use a stylus to dial (my fingers are too large to hit the touch screen accurately).  Its also really large.  I’m willing to try the Motorola Q or the Treo 700w but I’m afraid I’ll run into Windows Mobile issues again on top of their own device related issues.  My cell phones don’t work the way they are supposed to and it pisses me off!
So far, on my list of things that suck and don’t work right we have:

  1. Windows XP
  2. Windows Mobile
  3. Motorola MPx220
  4. Motorola SLVR
  5. Motorola Q (From what I’ve heard)
  6. Treo 700w (From what I’ve heard)
  7. OpenOffice
  8. Ubuntu (for lack of software… not code)
  9. Flock (for not working with extensions and the memory leak)
  10. All these “betas” out there today – all of Web 2.0, basically
  11. WordPress 2.04 (still no spell checker)
  12. 80% of the plug-ins I’ve downloaded (most are done for 1.5 or have their own “beta” bugs)
  13. All Dell computers (especially their laptops)
  14. All Compaq/HP computers (same as dell, just with even more junkware)
  15. Linksys Wireless routers
  16. TiVo
  17. Apple laptops (From what I’ve read)

The few things that I can think of that work well enough to highly recommend them to someone else are:

  1. iPods
  2. Blackberrys

THAT’S IT!

Everything else sucks because the quality isn’t there.  Why can’t people make quality products anymore?  Were the always crappy and I was too young to notice?  When can I get something that doesn’t suck?

I just want something to work the way its supposed to!

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