Sony Ericsson K750i

This marvel of technology is only about a year and half old, so it had at least a decade of cell phone software to build on when it came out. Still there are enough usability problems in the software—which, honestly, doesn’t have to do very much other than send bits of text to peopel—to frustrate even the calmest person. Some say that the iPhone has nothing to offer a market already saturated with hundreds of models; that the big touch screen and other hardware doodads aren’t enough to convince people to fork over that much cash. They miss the point: the hardware isn’t even the biggest feature of the iPhone. The big feature that everyone hopes to see from Apple is the one they’ve delivered so many times before: a simple, easy-to-use interface with a simple functional pallete that actually works. As noted above, cell phone software doesn’t have to do very much, but the Sony Ericsson can’t even manage the small set of functionality expected of it. Case in point: you can’t change the recipient list for some messages:

1. Write SMS (text message) and hit “Continue”
2. Select a recipient
3. Wonder why the recipient list is so short, showing only 5 contacts out of a total of about 50
4. Gaze in wonder as the phone selects one automatically and offers to send the message to that random person
5. Cancel furiously, sending the message to “Drafts”
6. Cancel back to the main menu
7. Enter “Drafts” and find the message
8. Open it and search through the menus, trying to find an option to change the recipient
9. Realize that there is no way to change the recipient
10. Discard the message, weeping in frustration
11. Go back to the main menu
12. Choose the recipient first, then rewrite the message and send it

Wheeeee.

The problem above is not that the phone mysteriously auto selected a recipient. There is a chance that a key was hit accidentally by a fumbling user. Nor is the problem necessarily that the phone showed only a mysteriously shortened list of possible recipients. All software has bugs like that. Shit happens. No, the problem is that the recipient for a message is seemingly uneditable once a text message is in a certain state. There is simply no clear way to add or remove recipients to some draft messages. That’s the kind of place where there can be absolutely no bugs. The software can have bugs as long as they can be repaired without data loss. The radio sometimes stops working? Cancel back to the main menu and restart it. As long as it doesn’t happen every ten minutes, it’s a forgivable error. But making the user re-enter text that is sitting mockingly on the screen in an unretrievable, unsendable state? That is not forgivable.

Mr. Cell Phone can be very happy that there was no brick wall handy against which he could be thrown.