Well, rats.
We picked up the phones tonight – Audiovox 8900s, to be exact.
It turns out that these phones have really loud, non-changeable, non-customizable musical tones for startup and shutdown. To me, they’re annoying but something I could maybe ignore, but to David, they’re a dealbreaker. Which is too bad, because otherwise they seem like nice phones aside from the non-changeable banner that gets in the way of Caller ID and the clock every 5 seconds whether you want it or not.
And the really loud tones on startup and shutdown. Embarassingly, head-turningly “who the hell has such a stupid cellphone sound” loud. David pointed out that if you forget to turn the phone off or put it in vibrate mode, and you remember in the middle of a movie or play that you need to turn it off, the tones will play no matter how quickly and savagely you hit the “off” button, because you must open the flip phone to turn it off. Not good.
I guess I’m pretty disappointed too – especially after running across numerous anti-8900 rants in a few “phonetech” forums like Howard Forums. Wish I’d seen them last night.
One rant in particular caught my eye:
I have to say that this is the most retarded misfeature I have had the displeasure to encounter in any piece of personal electronics.
“I know what will make our product appeal to the masses! Every time you turn the phone on, we’ll have it play a jerky logo animation at about 1.3 Hz. While it’s doing this, we’ll play merry-go-round music at maximum volume, even if the phone is set to vibrate! Then, just to make it sound even more like a $350 piece of equipment, we’ll cut the tune off abruptly just before it ends!
While you’re in there, can we have it do the same thing on shutdown too? And my 3-year old son likes hot air balloons, so paste random pictures of them on the outer display while all this is happening.
WAIT! I have an even better idea! Let’s not just make it the default…let’s NOT LET USERS CHANGE IT! We won’t even let them buy an alternative through Get It Now!”
Does Verizon have a room full of monkeys salvaged from amphetamine toxicity experiments to whom they entrust major branding and presentation issues? Do they really think they can sell this phone to PROFESSIONAL ADULTS? — (spork)
Why, yes – yes they do, spork. When they’re not writing poetry, they’re designing cell phones because they want to take over the world, be really annoying, or both. And their obsession with apples makes me wonder… are they actually Mac users? Could they possibly be the ones behind the notorious MYDoom virus?
Could it be… M(onke)YDoom??? Hmmmmm.
Now they have an entire year at their disposal. It’s their year. Their rules!
We must fight back against the lurking monkey threat, just as heroically paranoid Siamese-with-a-‘tudeBucky Katt does – if necessary, he is prepared to eat all the monkeys just to make them less annoying.
Seems like a typically American aggro response to a threat, doesn’t it? Eat the bad guys? Well, we can disavow all knowledge of Mr Katt’s plan, because after all, he’s a cat. With a regularly scheduled 9 o’clock freak-out.
The British have a novel approach to the impending threat of monkey dominion -they simply declare “No monkeys, please, we’re British.”
This wineshop in London’s Notting Hill district has already
taken a courageous but probably futile stand against primate-supremacists