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General discussion

Motorola T720

Apr 4, 2005 5:20PM PDT

Cell phones are probably one of the greatest inventions since popcorn. I have had one for, well, seems like forever. My first phone was a huge Motorola bag phone, then a Motorola brick phone, then the Motorola Startac with a few other brands mixed in. I consider the Startac to be one of the greatest phones ever, durable and dependable. One of my last was ran over by a truck and crushed but would still send and receive. I jumped in the lake to retrieve a vehicle forgetting I had the cell phone. No problem, couple hours under a hair dryer and it was good as new. Now along comes the new generation, cell phone cameras, Internet, so on and so on. Never could we have dreamed of doing the things cell phones can now do. The technology has been absolutely fantastic. That is fantastic with one exception. Phones are so sophisticated and fragile that it takes very little to damage them. I am currently running 3 Motorola T720?s. They are very dependable and expensive phones equal to or better than the Startac. However, in the first six months of operation, the phones ended up with damaged LCD screens which are not covered under warranty because Motorola and the other manufacturers know they are fragile and will be damaged numerous times. Every time this happens, I must send it to Motorola and pay them another $75 or so to have them repaired. When I questioned Motorola about the fragility of the phones, I was told that maybe I needed to have a hard case made that would completely encase the phone for protection. That?s well and good if I don?t intended to use the phone. In their quest for smaller and better, manufacturers have discarded the key function of any cell phone, DURABILITY. I contacted my provider to see if they had any phone that would stand the abuse my phones get daily. Amazingly, there were none ? all were almost identical in design. In every manufacturers quest to out do the competition and create the newest technology, not one of them designs a phone for the working class. When I say working class, I mean carpenters, mechanics, construction workers, ranchers, truck drivers, law enforcement, on and on or in my case, owner of a towing company. The phones today are made for the professional people who never have to pickup anything heavier than their briefcase, unload a load of steel, remove a motor, load a bad bull in a trailer, subdue a whacked out drug head, and who never have to crawl under a vehicle to remove the drive shaft (two of mine were broke doing this and the third was broke when I leaned against a vehicle to keep it from rolling.) The amazing part of this is that the majority of cell phone users in the world fall in to the ?working class group?. Many of us do not care if we can take a picture, get on the net or access the computer. We just want a phone that sends/receives calls and stands up to the jobs we must do. Wake up manufacturers, you are slowly limiting your customer base in the name of competition and technology. I can almost guarantee you that if you ignore the needs of the working class, you will have less sales thereby resulting in less revenue to design the gimmicks you now call cell phones. Someone capable of a little forethought needs to design a phone that will stand up to the daily activities of the working people! We want a phone that will receive calls and make calls but most important, we want a phone that will not break every time we lean up against a fence to rest!

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