It was just a few weeks ago that I posted a tirade on my flickr account about this jerk that ruined what was supposed to be a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast by spending literally an hour on his mobile parked two feet away from me - no, he didn’t have any food, he was just using the table as a comfrotable phone booth.
I have way too many issues to be used as a reference on whether this kind of behavior is really as bad as it feels to me, but if you look around, you’ll see that I’m not the only one who flares up over phone calls in enforced, confined spaces. Microsoft’s web site contains a guide to mobile etiquette that flat-out says it: Never talk in restaurants, ever!
Even my carrier, Cingular, runs an PR campaign around the theme of being Safe and Sensible, which points out that you should step out of a public area when taking a phone call.
So you can imagine how great I felt today when I see the product info for Motorola’s new tiny, in-the-ear bluetooth headset, which includes the suggestion that loud environments aren’t a problem with this earpiece: Just use the Motorola H5 MINIBLUE for strain-free conversation on the freeway or in a coffee shop.
No Motorola, you don’t use this in a coffee shop, and it’s a pretty freakin’ bad idea to use it on the freeway too. Have you been paying attention? Let me make two points.
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People hate it when someone engages in a cell phone conversation in a public place. Somewhere relaxing, like your so-called “coffee shop”, is perhaps the absoulute worst place to take a call. The longest sentence you should utter on a phone in a coffee shop is “hold on, let me step outside”.
Sorry, cell-phone calls in your car are a dangerous distraction, hands-free or not. The evidence is piling up, and it is overwhelming. Talking in your car turns you into a distracted idiot, and you run into people and things, killing and destroying them.
Motorola, I already quit using your phones because of the stupid side buttons that can’t be disabled and continually put my phone in silent mode. But that was just me. I think now we need to call for a nationwide boycott of your products until you quit giving advice that turns users of your products into dangerous idiots or annoying jerks.
Thanks for asking!
9 users commented in " Thanks a million, Motorola! (You suck) "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHere’s a nice study from University of Utah which once again reiterates: handsfree or not, if you are talking on the phone, you might as well be drunk:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/uou-doc062306.php
So motorola, no, we shouldn’t be using your nifty new headset in the coffe shop, and we shouldn’t be using it in the car.
In your cube, fine.
i like your new “cranky old man complains about things” blog!
also, you might want to adjust your BS meter while reading that article.
i’m not even sure what this is supposed to mean, but it sounds like BS.
and fatalities per mile, fatalities per registered car and fatalities per registered driver have all been falling steadily over the past 10 years (just as cell phone adoption has been rising).
ok, cars have more airbags now than they did 10 years ago. are people drinking and driving less? beats me, but i’m willing to guess that that number hasn’t changed very much (not nearly as much as the number of drivers talking while driving).
so here are the trends we’re dealing with:
car safety (improving steadily)*
drunk driving (probably not changing much)
cell phone use (skyrocketing)
fatal accidents (declining steadily)
i’m no freakonomist but i don’t see how you could look at that and say that talking on a cell phone is as dangerous as driving drunk. are all the phone-related accidents are minor?
*cars probably aren’t even safer considering the percentage of suv’s on the road now compared to 10 years ago.
I don’t think you can draw conclusions about cell phones by simply looking at the number of fatalities, because I think the overall effect of cell phone use is going to be drowned out by the other huge factors - such as air bags, improved highway construction, etc. (Things like burying the ends of guard rails and protecting bridge abutments are all having a big effect.)
Just as an example, let’s say that you use a cell phone in your car for an average of 10 minutes a week, and for those ten minutes you are driving with the equivalent of a BAC of .08%, just barely legally drunk.
Over a lifetime, how many accidents will that produce? 1? And of those accidents, what percent are fatal? 2.5%?
The result wouldn’t be enough to make a big difference in the stats.
I think the only way to really judge whether cell phone use affects driving ability is by testing drivers in the act, and I think that’s what the good studies are doing. Stuff like this always takes a long time to build a consensus, and of course, there is big money on the other side. If there is good science that can show that this thesis is BS, Motorola and Nokia will be able to fund it. So I trust the eventual outcome.
And right now, the consensus seems to be headed in the direction I called here, which is that you shouldn’t talk on the phone while driving.
Well, the Utah dudes say that driving with a cell phone is the same as driving drunk. They also estimate that 8% of drivers at any given time are talking on a cell phone.
If 8% of all drivers on the road were drunk, wouldn’t we see an ENORMOUS increase in fatal accidents?
i can’t argue that! and just looking around, i can’t necessarily argue that the 8% figure is way out of line. i think during rush hour it’s even more than that. so it’s definitely not the same thing as being raving drunk.
but i do know that i personally have a higher percentage of traffic blunders when distracted. so far i haven’t killed anyone.
Oh my God Motorola is atrocious. I first saw them in the cell phone industry and i said alright, they’re fine, i don’t mind them too much, I like Nokia better.
They have never improved significantly, in fact I find that their quality has been compromised, especially with their new series with their bad reception and low battery life.
And you thought that was enough? The logo resurrected inside my own house on a modem that my internet provider had given me in exchange for an old one to promise better service. They think they can succeed by teaming with internet providers after blowing it in the cell phone industry?
Since then the unit has been resetting on its own from once a month up to 3 times in 10 minutes. I am not exaggerating. That modem was a significant source of anger, and now the warrantee (???) is expired because i was suppose to exchange it withing a year. Well with all the support calls they should have suggested it to me. For a while I thought it may have been our dedicated cable or the Linksys wireless router that is loved by all, causing my misery. Even by removing all the possible interference it would still fail.
A faulty object replacing a magnificent piece of technology, the Terayon modem, must be under their responsibility. I may have had an inferior transfer rate with the previous one, but it had NEVER failed.
Just one small point: if you reported a problem to their technical support people, you may be able to return the product even though the warranty has expired. And if that doesn’t work, you can always attempt to chargeback the product on your credit card.
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