I’m not the sort of person that has much hate for anyone or anything, but my Motorola SLVR phone sure stirs the frustration. I just don’t know how anything can be so poorly designed.

Juliette had a Motorola phone a few years ago and absolutely hated it. The SLVR and the Razor got such great reviews that I figured they must have fixed the issues, but I was wrong.

1. The plug for charging the phone and connecting to the computer is a mini-USB plug. That was a selling point for me. Mini-USB is fast becoming a standard and I have plenty of wall chargers, car chargers and cables. The problem is, the phone uses mini-USB in a non-standard way and you can only use Motorola chargers and my phone goes uncharged even if I have a half a dozen USB chargers at my desk.
2. I have home numbers, cell numbers, business numbers, etc for most of my contacts. Most phones list all of these under one contact. The Motorola creates a new contact for each of these so that I have to scroll through three times as many names to find what I am looking for.
3. Speaking of contacts, most phones I have used allow you to press a button and it jumps to that letter in your contact list. The Motorola brings up a search screen where you start typing then press OK. It works, but it is several more key presses.
4. If you have an un-timed appointment in the phone’s calendar with an alarm, a person’s birthday for example, the alarm will go off at midnight, then continue to beep every minute until you get out of bed, find the phone and acknowledge it.
5. You would think that you could set the alarm to silent or that it wouldn’t go off if the phone was on silent, but you would be wrong.
6. In fact, the phone will beep every few minutes after pretty much anything. Very annoying to my co-workers if I leave it on my desk.
7. You can beam contacts too it via bluetooth. This was another selling feature for me, but once again, it is broken. Once again, there are standards that this phone doesn’t follow. Most phones and PDA’s have first name, last name. If you send this to the phone, it will fail, you need to have the whole name in the first name field or something like that.
8. The camera is one of the worst I have seen in any cell phone. It is also a pain to use. Take a picture, it then asks you if you want to send it to someone. No? Just want to save it, scroll down through several entries, hit OK, scroll down to select where to save it, hit OK, wait while picture saves. It really takes the spontaneity out of taking pictures.
9. It is supposed to be a smart phone, but it has the most useless suite of applications. I would expect this from a ten year old phone.

What about the good features of the phone?

1. It looks cool.

That’s about it! It will make great landfill once my current contract is up. I am thinking of getting a Blackberry to replace my phone and Palm. What do you use and what would you recommend?