The Return of the Little Black Book?: (This is a long cathartic rant. Consider yourself warned.) Just in case any search engines are paying attention, let me say this: Motorola Phone Tools is a festering pile of crap. Here's the story.
I have a Motorola RAZR V3. All I wanted to do was back up my phone book. I don't use the phone for any other nonsense except to make calls and text, and I have a bunch of numbers in there that I have nowhere else. If I dropped the thing in the lake or something, I would be days trying to round up all the numbers I'd lost. Doesn't seem like an unreasonable request. I can't imagine everyone not wanting to do this. I'm not looking for anything special, just a dump to a text file would be fine. So how does one back-up a RAZR?
Well, you have to buy a copy of Motorola Phone Tools (MPT) which costs in excess of $30. That will give you everything you need to sync your contacts, manage you MP3 library, and fiddle with your ringtones. Oh and it will backup your phone book too, if that's the sort of thing you're into.
Now the phone itself cost me $99 so essentially we are talking about a 30% premium just to back up the phone numbers I have stored. I'd take the time to write them out by hand before I'd pay that. Fortunately, MPT is selling for a couple of bucks on eBay (which says something right there), so I ordered a copy.
It arrives. I load up the CD and do the install. Fire up the program and it asks if I want to get any updates. I do. So it downloads the updates. I now have the latest verison of MPT. So far so good. But no farther.
Now I fire it up and it tells me to plug in the phone so it can configure it. I do so, but after a minute it tells me it can't identify the phone, and asks if I want to check for updates to the software. Since it's either that or nothing, I tell it to check for the software updates. It comes back and tells me I am up to date, which I already know, and then asks me if I would like to try to set my phone up manually. Now, the RAZR V3 has to be one of the most common, if not the most common, phones in existence, but the Motorola's own phone tools cannot identify it. OK, fine. I'll try to configure it manually. Except any attempt to do so causes the app to simply crash. Sheesh.
So I do the usual: uninstall, reintstall, reboot, etc. No good: it still doesn't recognize the phone, still makes me check for updates, and still crashes on any attempt to manually configure.
So it's out to the Motorola site for support where I find Motorola has outsourced the creation of MPT to a company called Avanquest. So I hit the Avanquest site. Avanquest doesn't seem to reference its affiliation with MPT and simply offers a completely useless FAQ.
Great. Next up: Google. I start trolling the various page results from Google and I begin to piece together the situation from a variety of different pages on a variety of different internet forums filled with MPT complaints.
The first thing to do is to get the latest handset drivers from Motorola. So I go back to the Motorola site and stagger through pages until I find the driver downloads. Except you can't download the drivers unless you are registered as a Motorola Developer. I have no idea what it means to be a Motorola Developer and I certainly never will be one in my life, but registration is free so I register, meaning Motorola gets to send me some sort of spam now I suppose. In a few minutes, the registration information arrives via email and I go back to the Motorola site with my login credentials and download the latest handset driver.
Sadly, no change in my results when trying to run the app. Still doesn't identify the phone, still crashes when I try to configure manually. So, more forum trolling. I find one sharp-eyed poster has discovered that the Avanquest software installation omits downloading two essential files. You have to go to the CD and copy them over to your installation folder yourself. So I do that. Still no change.
Yet more trolling turns up the suggestion that instead of just running the app, right-click it and "Run as Administrator". Bingo! It doesn't blow up. It still doesn't recognize the phone still (the most common freakin' phone in the world) but at least it's allowing me to do a manual configuration. The manual configuration requires me to identify the phone model by some sort of model number designations that I don't understand. Luckily I manage to guess the right answer. I now have the actual MPT software up and running.
The software itself is abysmal. The interface is inscrutable. It is slow. The messages are cryptic. Fortunately, I just need to do the one task, back-up my phone book entries, and then I can pretend it doesn't exist until I build up some new phone numbers to save.
Finally, I have my phone book entries in a file (.csv) so I can reconstruction them in case of disaster.
Speaking as someone who is a 15-year professional software developer, I am absolutely stunned that this situation can exist in this day and age. 1) I understand the charging your customers for bells and whistles and extras, but a simple back up of your sim card should not cost any money. This is just responsible computing 101. Managing Mp3s mixing ringtones, syncing contacts, sure -- but simply backing up data? What kind of business expects its users to pay extra for the ability to back up their data? 2) The utter lack attention to user experience blows my mind. That anyone would think that Motorola Phone Tools is useable piece of software is unthinkable. If I tried to release software like this I would be cleaning toilets in McDonalds in about two seconds flat. 3) The complete lack of anything resembling support is outright negligence, plain and simple.
It took me a couple of hours to get software running for the simple purpose of backing up phone data. Never, even in the darkest days of MS-DOS config.sys files, did I ever have such an experience before. They made me, their customer, feel like an idiot for using their product instead of just taking the twenty minutes or so it would have taken to copy the numbers into a little black book.
Imagine what this would have been like for someone who payed the $30+ dollars to Motorola for this. Or even for someone without the experience and resources I have. Motorola should be deeply, deeply ashamed of themselves. I will remember this experience whenever I see the Motorola name on any product in the future.
