McGarvey’s Words

On my desk sits a Moto T720 from Verizon. It’s there someplace, probably under news clips reporting the resignation of Christopher Galvin as Moto’s CEO and another announcing that, apparently, despite promises, Motorola will fail to deliver camera phones to its key carrier customers in time for them to hawk them as holiday gifts. Why? The answer to the delivery failure probably is the same as for why Galvin resigned (nepotism is a sure route to business failure and remember that Motorola was founded by Galvin’s grandfather). But that’s not my problem. The puzzling, frustrating Moto T730 is.

I paid over $200 for the phone (it’s only $149.99 when signing a two-year agreement but I won’t go there) and it is a beguiling gadget. The screen is knockdown gorgeous – an LCD display capable of displaying over 4000 colors and with backlighting for better visibility in dim surroundings. Add in a light weight (4 oz.) and tri-mode digital CDMA coverage (meaning it works in most of the US and Canada) and this is a phone that won me over as soon as I saw it in a Verizon store.

I recall the first time I wrote about cell phones, about 10 years ago for the trendy LA STYLE Magazine. In this article (where I reported a bundle of 100 “peak minutes” would run around $50!), I wrote this: “Motorola MicroTAC Lite (list $1,196) is the rage now, weighing 7.5 oz. with standard battery for 45 minutes talk, 8 hours standby.” Motorola was hip back then, tres cutting-edge, and its phones poked out of the pockets of all the Hollywood in-crowd. I did not actually own a MicroTAC – not at $1196 which was twice as much as I was paid for the LA STYLE article – but I had visited the retailers, interviewed owners, and I was sold on the fact that MicroTAC ruled. Back then, too, Motorola easily held over half the cell phone market. It was king of the hill and no fall was in sight.

As I mull on the T720, I’m saddened by how far Moto has tumbled. People nowadays covet Siemens phones, Samsung, even LG (!), and a few retro-heads still sing the praises of Nokia (which also seems to be stumbling despite its Numero Uno ranking), but I get no raves, no unsolicited praise for Motorola products (and I’m on record as a fan of the Moto V66 – which however cost me -$50 from T-Mobile, that is, $250 less than the T720).

Enough preamble. The Moto T720 is a poster child for where Motorola went wrong. This is a phone with a pretty face but decrepit innards. Consider battery life for starters – or call it battery death. Moto says you’ll get 160 minutes of talk time but I never have. If I get half that before the thing starts its annoying, whiny beep demanding a recharge, I’m lucky. Moto also says to expect 195 hours of standby time, but, again, if I get half, the gods of mobile telephony are smiling upon me.

The next irritant is that the navigational buttons are, well, spongy. You can click and click and nothing happens. There have been times when I’m trying to scroll through the phone book and I’m getting nowhere so badly I want to smash this silly phone against the sidewalk.

Oh, there are cool aspects to the Moto T720. I’ve set the ringer for instance to a female voice that politely says, “You have an incoming call.” The keypad is backlit which is simply wonderful when lights are down. Voice fidelity (incoming and outgoing) is good – I get relatively few of the “Are you using a cell phone?” complaints and, at my end, I hear the other party just fine.

But the biggest irritant is that if I had taken the time to read online reviews, I would have seen complaint after complaint about battery life. Why didn’t I surf the Web – Amazon, for instance, features 16 user reviews – and soak up the rising tide of user negativity before signing on the line that is dotted? Call me lazy, call me stupid...just don’t call me on the Moto T720 because it surely will power down in mid-conversation.

And that is why I do not take two year deals. I’m pretty sure I will still want Verizon service when this contract runs out next summer but I am very sure I'll dump the T720. Call that another vote cast against nepotism.

Update File

o Don’t write text messages on a cell phone, send them! That’s the advice from reader Jerry Alexandratos, who liked much of my slam against using mobile phones to text – but who pointed out that sometimes it is better to receive. When he needed to reach his boss urgently and the boss couldn’t be tracked down with landline phones, Alexandratos sent him a voice mail, an email, and a text message. “He never got the e-mail, and the voice mail was late, but the text message got there on time.” Give it a go. Most carriers offer easy online tools on their home pages for concocting text messages to be sent to their subscribers.

O Spam still annoys. Reader Bill Owen says he subscribed to Spamache, a server-level junk email filtering service, largely on my recommendation. But he says that the service is no longer performing up to snuff. Caveat emptor. Spamache still offers a free seven-day trial; be wary about extending into a paid subscription.

o News from Bloomba – the much touted anti-Spam email program – is even less encouraging. After I’d used it for around 45 days, the program ate my email. Or something. I haven’t debugged it and don’t know the “why,” but I can say it turned against me and destroyed many megs of email. I thought I had a backup but that wouldn’t install. My recommendation of Bloomba is withdrawn, and I’m back to using PocoMail, back to wrestling with upwards of 75 pieces of junk daily.

What phone do you favor? Tell us what and why and the best emails will go here.

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About Robert McGarvey

Author of How to Dotcom (Entrepreneur Press), McGarvey is writing a book on Brain Wars, the rise of cognitive science and the search for truths about thinking. A onetime columnist for BizTravel.com, he is a frequent contributor to dozens of magazines, ranging from American Legion to Selling Power, American Way, and Rutgers. He has also contributed to Harvard Business Review. For the past five years, he has served as "The Ombudsman" for PORTHOLE Cruise Magazine. Still curious about McGarvey? Read up on him here.

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