The Motorola V400 phone is a piece of crap

(originally posted 2004-10-21 14:45:27)

For quite some time now, I've had the Motorola V400 cell phone through Cingular wireless. After several years of purchasing unlocked cheap used phones off of ebay and getting free phones from the cellular providers, I decided to splurge and purchase the top of the line camera phone. I used to do this several years ago, then when phones started to get more expensive and more fragile I stopped. It was a mistake to buy an expensive phone again. What a waste of money.

Especially considering I am on my third phone! The first two had serious technical problems. The first one just stopped working one day. Would not power on completely -- just "grey screen of death". Free replacement under warranty, but the store didn't have any spares in stock. Without a phone for a week.

The second phone stopped registering when the flip was closed. Same story with a replacement, not in stock.

I originally purchased this for the wireless internet access and to be able to email pics places. I don't know why I deluded myself into thinking that either of these would work well. They don't. The web browser is slow and tiny, and the only thing I ever used it for was to check the weather (which I now know I can do for free by calling the local news channel). The web browser would randomly forget my native language and ask if I wanted English or Spanish each time I used it. What a pain. The shortcuts for links on pages don't work consistently either. Entering URLs with the keypad is painfully slow.

What about emailing from the phone? When it did work, there was usually a multiple hour delay, causing you to resend messages repeatedly. There doesn't appear to be a way to give your outgoing email address a friendly address either. It's your phone number @mms.mycingular.com. (easy to remember right?). It's also not cheap.

After giving up on the wireless internet features, I focused on getting my money's worth out of "phone" features.

Here are some of the highlights that drew me to the phone:

• 
  
  
  VGA camera
  Color screen
  MP3 ringtones
  standard 2.5 mm headset jack
  Fast-Forward capable
  Speakerphone
  data kit capable
  java game capable

Before we break down these (mis)features, the most frustrating thing about this phone is the horrible keypad response. When entering numbers there is often a 1-2 second lag. Sometimes this is so bad you can easily misdial or navigate to the wrong menu. It is very easy to "key ahead" of the phone and be forced to wait for it to catch up, or even worse, to press keys so quickly they get thrown away. For some reason, this problem is even worse when the phone is off hook. If you combine this with the speakerphone problems (see below) you can easily get lost on your own phone or in a phone tree on a call.

Camera

I'll keep this short. It's the only thing about the phone that hasn't disappointed me. The camera is actually very good, and especially good in low-light conditions.

However, a consistent theme on this phone is Bad Interface Design. Built-in to the phone is a bunch of worthless sample pictures that you can't delete. You must scroll through about a dozen of these each time you look through your pictures. Of course getting the pictures off the phone is a chore.

Color screen

Ok, the screen is good. Very nice. I suspect this is why most people buy this phone, because after you open it, it's quite purty.

MP3 Ringtones

Very cool, but incredibly hard to get into the phone without the data kit (impossible without the data kit or internet access). There is NO documentation on how to download MP3 from the internet. It took me a week a two trips to Cingular store before I found a message posted on an obscure discussion board that had the magic incantation necessary to download MP3's to the phone.

Headset Jack

Unnoteworthy, except that it has a rubber plug that is not tethered to the phone. I've lost two already.

Speakerphone

Great sound quality, but the speaker is on the back and the mic is on the front. So how are you supposed to orient this phone? Also, you cannot simply switch to speakerphone whenever you want. The phone only lets you switch to speaker when it feels like it. You cannot, for example, dial a number with the speaker phone. Nor can you enter a number and switch to speakerphone to listen for the other party to answer.

Fast forward capable.

This is a nice feature from Cingular that forwards calls to your home phone. There are many caveats! First, specific to this model of phone, the cradle required to use the forwarding function is a flimsy piece of ill-fitting plastic junk. When I first opened it and took it home, I was certain the store sold me the wrong model of cradle. The connectors are tiny and they feel like they are going to break off every time you put the phone in the cradle. The connector supports the weight of the phone.
When I say "put the phone in the cradle", I mean "crunch the phone onto the flimsy connector". That's what the phone does. It crunches everytime you put it on.

As an aside about Fast Forward -- here are the things cingular won't tell you. First, you must have a pretty good tower signal to use this function. Next, the cradle whines at you if you don't seat the phone just right, and since there is no switch to enable the forwarding (cradling the phone activates it) you must seat the phone very very carefully lest you piss off the cradle. It IS a nice feature, but barely worth it.

Data Kit Capable

Motorola, or some demented division of it, has software package creatively titled "mobile PhoneTools" that lets you manipulate the phone from your PC via a USB cable. It lets you do things like upload and download sounds and pictures. It should be free but it is not. My suspicion is if it was free, more people might actually use it there would be a greater chance someone who matters might find out how awful it is.
It is not easy to use, it is embarrasingly slow (and sometimes simply doesn't work), and get this -- the interface is an actual-size picture of your phone! I am sure some real proud yet oblivious marketing person thought that was a good idea. The application launches other applications that actually do the work, and the main application has NO MENUS. You have to hover over all the controls on the phone to find out what does what. Of course, the utilities themselves have names that bear little resemblance to their function.

Instead of taking advantage of the huge interface real estate on you computer screen, the designers decided if you put up with a cell phone interface already, another one must be ok. You also must be careful how you connect the phone to the computer and launch the software, because if you get the order wrong, it won't recognize the phone.

Java Games

Pay for games. On my phone. You're fucking joking, right?

Even more misfeatures:

- when you turn the phone off, it plays an irritating melody. Did you just walk into a meeting or theater and forget to turn your phone off? Better just pull the battery, because the phone makes noise when you want to silence it.

- One side of the phone has two up/down scroll buttons and a select button. One would expect that you use the up and down buttons to scroll through choices and the single third button to select. One would be wrong. The functions are reversed. You press the DOWN scroll button to get to a menu, and "scroll" through choices with the single button. I hope someone lost their job over that design decision.

In fact, if you are an engineer who worked on the V400 design and you think anything I mentioned here is working the way it should, please email me and tell me why. I can find nothing in this phone that is smartly designed, sleek, or intuitive. It's a slow clunky monkey turd, and for what it costs, it should be at least a fast monkey turd.