The Big V

The other day I read an article in the Business Week magazine about how Motorola is now making "cool" phones. I must admit that I want the new Razr model...

However, my current phone, the T730 from Verizon, is a piece of junk. I bought this particular phone because it was at the time (March 2004) the only phone in that was sold by Verizon Wireless that also was supported by Apple's iSync.

Here are some of my major gripes with this phone (not just software problems):

• Battery life sucks. I usually get about 3 days of standby as long as I don't get many text messages. If I got a lot of messages, it would last maybe a day. The last few days, it has not been lasting long at all -- I have to charge it every night.
• Every so often, it just reboots itself. Sometimes at my office I'll pick it up to check the time (before I started wearing my watch regularly) only to find it asking for my security code. The only time it does that is on power up. Why does it reboot itself when just sitting there, fully charged?
• After leaving it on for several days, the timer alarms stop working. After a reboot, all the backlogged alarms go off. What use is it to remind me of events from yesterday?
• The address book sorts by first name.
• When the power drains all the way, only the wall charger will revive the phone. The car charger or USB charger will just make the phone backlight flicker on and off like a heartbeat.
• The "call dropped" signal is so sharp and loud that I'm afraid it will pierce my eardrum. The only option is to turn that off so that I never know when calls drop until the person on the other end stops responding.
• The radio is the pits. It often has no signal where others have two or three bars of signal. It drop calls all the time and has very choppy sound even with near full strength signal.
  

My original Oris watch was quite accurate. I set the time based on the clock on one of my servers which is synchronized to the rest of the world via NTP. After about a month, I checked up on it and it was a mere 20 seconds behind, which is incredible for a mechanical watch.

Yesterday I checked how accurate my replacement watch is... After two weeks of wearing it (and having set it based on the same server) it is a few minutes fast. I reset it yesterday morning, and now, after about 36 hours, it seems to be 15 seconds fast. That's pretty lousy timekeeping, I must say. I'll see how it is in a few days. If this keeps up, I'll have to send it back for calibration -- if they let me: the manual says that -5 to +30 seconds per day is normal. This is getting to be a totally rediculous adventure.