I'm posting this here rather than on a phone-specific forum like howardforums because I'm not really looking for "just download this software and hex edit your phone's flash ROM" level of info. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
I figure that a lot of FT tech forum users have familiarity with both Motorola and Nokia mobiles. Though I'm a bit of a geek in many ways, I tend to be a late-adopter on mobiles. I've been happily using a series of Nokias for several years, and what I've always liked about them is their (to me, at least) intuitive menu structures, with useful features that are both easily discoverable and easily accessible.
A few days ago while in London, I finally picked up a Motorola mobile. I needed to get a replacement unlocked GSM quad-band (or at least North American 850/1900/1800 tri-band) to replace a damaged phone for a family member. Or, I thought to myself, to dump my aging but useful Nokia 6200 on said family member while I got the nice new phone. Seeing that it's easy to get a decent-priced unlocked phone in Europe without any of the contract extension or subsidy-locked nonsense of the US carriers, I picked up a Moto RAZR V3, at a good price with a pay-as-you-go T-Mobile UK SIM. I verified it worked with my Cingular/AT&T and T-Mobile USA SIMs, and then bought it. I had a new phone, it worked with my US accounts, and I even had a local UK mobile # with about 200 minutes of usage on that account for my trips there, all for much less than buying it from Cingular or T-Mobile in the States, and no contract lock-in. And I my daughter could have my old Nokia 850/1900/1800 tri-band which would save me buying a replacement from Cingular and serve her ok on her first trip to Europe next spring. I was pretty pleased with myself.
At least until I went to set up the phone to my preferences. Now I'm a newbie to Motorola mobiles (unless you count my 1994-vintage 1st-gen US-digital TDMA brick-flip), but with so many folks using the RAZR over the past couple of years, and its good pricing now that it's been superceded by the V3i, KRZR, SLVR etc., I figured I'd be happy with it. But its UI seems so awkward, and features of Nokias I've grown to use often either seem totally missing or horribly implemented.
Being that I'm a Moto newbie (and I gather the KRZR, newer RAZRs, SLVR and PEBL are all similar in operation), I wonder if I'm missing some usage concepts. I'd appreciate any advice on this. Here are my questions/issues about features I either can't find, are poorly explained in the manual, or just don't seem to work the way I expected and hoped:
1) One-touch dialing: I know how to change it from SIM to PHONE, but how do you set up which phone numbers are dialed from each 1-touch digit? Every Nokia I've had since 1998 lets you assign whatever contact number you choose to digits 2-8 (or 2-9 if 9 isn't reserved for emergency.) Other than 1 working for the voicemail access number, I don't see any way to set up what contacts I want on each number - e.g. 2 should be my other mobile#, 3 my home number, 4 my daughter, 5 my son, 6 my wife's work, 7 my wife's mobile, 8 my office voicemail. This is trivially easy on Nokias but seems impossible on this Moto. It seems to have just picked some numbers off the SIM randomly. I haven't tried this yet, since it appears to be ridiculously stupid, but do I have to erase all the numbers stored in the phone (I had copied numbers from my two SIMs to the phone's phonebook so I had one set of all numbers), then re-enter the numbers into the phonebook in the order of the one-touch dialing I want? In other words, erase them all, then enter my other mobile# first (so it shows as one-touch dial digit #2?), then my home#, etc.
2) Display either SIM or Phone phonebook, not both? Again easy to do from Nokias under Contacts - Settings. Since I keep most numbers stored on the phone but some on the SIM, I'm seeing duplicates. I'd rather normally just see the phone's stored numbers, unless I specifically switched to viewing SIM or Phone + SIM. Especially since the phonebook scrolling is so slow - about as slow as my Nokia 6310i from a few years ago when doing Phone+SIM.
3) Timed Profiles. I get it that "Ring Styles" are the equivalent feature to Nokia's Profiles. On any Nokia, I can select, for example, the Silent profile and choose "Timed" just before going into a 2-hour meeting, and set it to expire at a time 2 hours from now, so that I don't have to remember to set it back to my normal ringing profile. Any way to do this on Motos?
4) Website bookmarks: Any way to type them in, in advance? Nokia has "Bookmarks" under the "Services" menu and you can easily enter the WAP URL. I got the RAZR more-or-less set up for Cingular (old AT&T) mMode but I can't enter any bookmarks. Upon going to a site, I can press/hold the menu key to create a Shortcut for the current page, but this is problematic in that a) I can't do it in advance, only on the page in question, and b) these appear to be shared with the overall phone features shortcuts rather than a web-specific set of bookmarks. Am I missing some better way to do this on the Moto?
5) Travel-specific: Some serious problems with the WAP UA and NWA sites, which worked fine on the Nokia 6200. Forms that need to be filled out (e.g. MP or WP#, or drop-downs to select features) don't seem to be accessible to this browser. Any settings or alternate sites? I'm using
http://ua.flightlookup.com and
http://wireless.nwa.com/wml/cin.wml as the URLs.
Yeah, I know, "It's not a Nokia." I don't want to get into "religious wars" about Nokia vs. Motorola here anymore than I care to get into CO vs. UA wars on the travel forums. But since I'm coming from a Nokia-centric background I just might be missing the paradigm for Motorola usage and thus not using the phone optimally. I can't believe it's this hard to do some of these things, and hoping it's just because I'm going about it the wrong way.
If there isn't anything to be done about these, then probably my daughter is getting the shiny new RAZR instead of my crummy old Nokia 6200. However there are lots of things I do like about the RAZR including the form factor and the excellent audio. Also, am I right that a PEBL, KRZR, or SLVR would work pretty much the same way? Please enlighten me! Thanks.