Motorola L7089

Sometimes we like to claim that the use of computers is justified by productivity gains that it grants us; and I believe that portable computers extend that productivity gain over all the parts of our lives that are not tied to a desk in an office. But this only applies if the computers are usable, and have an intelligently designed user interface. Some computers are very well designed from this perspective, and a study of the Palm and Newton user interfaces will show just how much effort was spent on making them easy to use; Psion is another example of a company that has refined their user interface for greater efficiency over years of development. But step outside the world of PDAs, and you find products that have apparently been designed to infuriate us and reduce efficiency. Take mobile phones as an area of dubious efficiency, and the Motorola L7089 as an excellent example of the genre.

The L7089 is a good phone, as phones go. It is reasonably small, has an excellent multi-day battery life, includes IrDA support, and is tri-band, so that I can use on Orange, Vodaphone and on American GSM. Motorola even provide an international charging adaptor with it, and software to synchronise with your PC (TrueSync from Starfish). So far, so good. However, the user interface is considerably worse than that of the Ericsson SH888, which I found reasonably frustrating. For one simple example, you can press the OK button to browse through a list of recently called numbers, which is both easy and convenient. However, if you want to abandon that operation, you naturally press the "Cancel" button, with is conveneiently paired with the OK button. The result is that is still deposits the phone number you were viewing into the dialling buffer, but with the last digit deleted. To clear the display, you have the choice of either holding down Cancel for a few seconds, or pressing it repeatedly. One golden rule of user interface design: actions that are easy to get into should be equally easy to get out of. As a second example: the "Menu" button is both big and centrally placed. To navigate through the menu, however, you have to presse the much smaller "OK" and "Cancel" buttons. If you have navigated down three levels and several items across, one press of the "Menu" button will return you back to the start of the menu system again. The same golden rule is broken again; I'd really like to see the Menu button having the same action as the OK button.

As a mobile data user, there is another annoyance. You have to explicitly enable infra-red before every call; apparently, if you make repeat calls very quickly, it will stay on, but I find it doesn't work out for me, in practice, as the time between failed calls is too great. Enabling infra-red is two key presses, which isn't too bad if you do it rarely. But on the average train journey, I find that even without interruptions I have to make three or four short calls to process my email and grab some news to read. Given tunnels, cuttings and dodgy ISPs, a dozen connection attempts isn't out of the question, each with a quick souple of stabs to enable infra-red each time. Add to that the fact that the IR window is on the top of the phone, it means that what should be a simple process is a complicated series of juggling attempts with flying elbows on a crowded train.

The previously mentioned TrueSync is more than a little frustrating, as well. First, it only supports Windows 95 and 98, not on NT. Secondly, the match of data in TrueSync to that on the phone or SIM has a few gaps, which means that you can easily end up deleting all of the old records from your SIM rather than updating them. If you find yourself in this position, a word of advice: don't do it. I find that it is far easier to sync a Psion Series 5 with SG Software's Phoneman Pro or a Psion Revo, using the built-in Phone application (which is actually a cut-down version of Phoneman), and then use that to update the phone memory.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: January 24, 2000