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I will never have another Motorola product



Motorola has brought out a smart new mobile phone, the V8, as a replacement for the stylish Razr3. It is solidly made and runs on Linux.

But it will not sync with the Mac and the manfacturer's policy is not to support Mac, unlike their earlier models some of which ran iTunes and which synced with not problems. It gets worse. You cannot sync it with Windows XP without buying extra software from Motorola so you would have to type in all your contacts by hand, which is also no good as the phone does not do the character Å which I have quite a few of in my names list. It has no backwards compatibility and will not work with the older version of phone tools, a new version is not supplied nor can one be downloaded from the Motorola web site. Oddly, the phone is recognised as a camera by both XP and Linux, but the "detect phone" process refuses to register the thing. They seem to have gone to considerable effort to ensure incompatibility. They have even replaced the standard mini-USB socket with some fancy special one so a special cable is needed. Amazing, in its way.What are the people in the company thinking of? Or where they all high on some substance or other?

Has the firm got a death wish or is this the usual USA corporate arrogance? Anyway, I am taking it back to Carphone Warehouse. The assistant, not unreasonably assumed that if the earlier model would work with the Mac, then its successor would also. Why would anyone produce a bit of kit and lock out a significant chunk of its potential user base? Motorola's so-called help line is useless and so other than as a mantelpiece ornament, I have no use for it so and I am changing it for a Sony-Ericsson.

I will never buy a Motorola product again.

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