More fun with bad UI design: Verizon software for the Motorola RAZR M3

[marcmagus]

Yes, I have a RAZR. Yes, I have one of those stupid MP3-playing ones. The former is because it's portable and gets good battery life. The latter is because it was the only one I could get free with my plan. That's not what this is about.

See, Verizon replaces the Motorola stock UI software with its own garbage while it's doing whatever software patching is required to make the phone work with its networks. Among other things, they make sure that the new official software can't transfer media files directly to a computer (that's right, the phone used to be capable of downloading ringtones from your computer, but Verizon disabled that feature to make a quick buck. Jerks.). The whole thing is pretty awful.

I've found a new depth of terrible, though. The Alarm Clock feature. Apparently when you store a repeating alarm (daily or M-F; nice feature), it stores the time of day of the alarm with respect to UTC or something. I'm not sure what it's doing. What I know is that my 8:30am alarm mysteriously changed to a 9:30am alarm when we started DST this weekend. (I'll spare you the rant about DST today.) Not only does it go off at 9:30, but the clock displays it at 9:30. What percentage of users do you think want their repeating alarm to hold constant with respect to the sun when we switch to DST, vs. what percentage to hold constant with respect to the wall clock?

Sorry I overslept on Monday. I made the mistake of trusting Verizon with my alarm, and they screwed it up.

Comments

[heptadecagram.livejournal.com]

I bet what happened is that the software doesn't store the definition of the repeating alarm, but each individual instance (So, when you create a repeating alarm for M-F, it creates five instances of that alarm). And further, it stores those alarms as offsets from 'now' (which is cheaper in terms of battery life than polling every second. Combine those two, and you get an alarm set to go off at 9:30.

Watch in three weeks to see if your alarms jump an hour, when DST normally starts.

[illogicalvulcan.livejournal.com]

I miss that alarm feature on my old cell phone. My new phone only does single alarms, and my Palm's alarm is equally helpful. Now I actually need to remember to set my alarm every day. Normally this isn't an issue because I wake up about ten minutes before my alarm. But on days when my internal clock in screwy, like this week, it's just a mess.