On the eve of the arrival of my Jesus phone, I cannot help but feel a certain nostalgia for Motorola. Back when I was a wee lad, I recall my grandpa having a motorola radio in his car and office and all the trucks. Then, at some point in the early 1980s, the radio was replaced with a Motorola cell phone in his car. (The lock code was 4820 — and it took less than 1 trip to the boat to decrypt it.)

When it came time for me to start purchasing cell phones, I went the Motorola route. I had a Motorola flip phone. A MicroTAC. A MicroTAC Elite (one of my favourites). A StarTAC (with LED display). A StarTAC (with LCD display). A Razor. A black Razor. A blue Razor V3i. A red Razor V3i. A gold Razor V3i. A blue Krzr. A black Krzr. (There may have been a short lived Nokia and Sony Ericsson flirtation somewhere between StarTAC LCD and the first Razor…)

As time went on, cell phone revisions came more quickly and my desire to hack the phones to, you know, make them suck less, rose. My current phone, the black Krzr has a HEAVILY modified firmware courtesy of: Yours truly.

Tomorrow, a new dawn begins on the mobile phone landscape globally. Yes, the iPhone. Not because the phone is such a revolutionary game changing piece of hardware (although, that is part of it) but because it will, for the first time, open the Internet on hand held devices to entrepreneurs that will be unrestricted by mobile carriers. Thank you, Apple. But, with every dawn, there’s a sunset. This sunset ends my brand loyalty to Motorola. Sorry, grandpa.

Without further pontification, from the home office in West Hempstead NY, the Top Ten things I will NOT miss from the days of my Motorola Razors…

10: Always being asked if it’s “ok” to go online. Yes, for the love of God, it’s ok.

9: Always being informed, with great delay, how many bytes were transferred after going online. Why is email from Tim always 921 bytes more than Fred? Why does my phone think I care?

8: Slow to respond number entry when trying to dial. How hard is this to make work right?

7: Having to press 6 buttons to get to my inbox. Can that happen in 1 press? Maybe 2?

6: Waiting for Java. Memo to Sun: Give it up.

5: “Message Too Long! Message Truncated!” Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait…

4: WAP Decks controlled by “the man”. You don’t get to make media choices for me.

3: Expensive replacement cartridges (Oh wait, that’s what I’ll NOT miss about Gilette Razor…)

2: iTap.

1: Unbearably slow call waiting controls

Can’t wait until tomorrow…

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Emil at 11:45 pm on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 in Gear, Industry, Mobile, Technology, iPhone. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.