Andy Laub

On Monday night, I got a phone call. It went to my voicemail because I was in the middle of a conversation with somebody. Because of that same conversation, I forgot about the voicemail until the person called me again, and after that call there was no point in checking the voicemail, so I didn’t.

Mistake.

The alarm went off in the morning as it usually does, and I glanced briefly at the time before hitting one of the side volume buttons to silence it as I always do. Then I fell back asleep. Then I woke up 35 minutes later, panicked and wondering why my alarm hadn’t gone off again. I opened it, and things became clear.

When alarms occur on a Motorola phone, they go into a sort of queue and await your attention. The “missed call” message was in this list, as was the “new voicemail”. And because I never cleared these notifications (since I closed the phone upon hanging up the previous night), the snoozed alarm fell inline behind these other 2 less time sensitive items.

So that’s how I overslept because of bad UI design.

Then there were the times where I’d try to open the phone as it was ringing, which normally isn’t an issue. Every so often though, I can’t open it on the first try. Again, not normally an issue, but the way the hinge is designed, it snaps the phone shut before you can try to open it again. The problem here is that opening the phone the tiniest bit answers the call, and that snap shut is enough to disconnect, leaving the caller to think that you’ve hung up on them.

Finally, there’s the fact that it doesn’t get a signal in my basement. Nor does it always work with the stereo headset. And it isn’t very good at playing music. And there’s a piece of tape on the battery to keep the cover from falling off.

But it hasn’t scratched, so there’s that, I guess.