Goodbye, Moto! And don't come back

Motorola, the company notorious for its flamboyant Hello Moto! advertisements, has badly damaged its brand with the flawed RAZR cell phone.

I've been using a RAZR for a few months now, and it's a purchase I greatly regret. The controls along the edge of the top half of the phone are way too easy to trigger by mistake. On the other hand, I can barely operate the keypad buttons at all, they're so small and touchy. In the menus, it takes several confirmation steps to enter a new phone number, but you can delete a number forever with one accidental keypress.

Customer survey results show how deeply the RAZR's poor usability has cut Motorola. Three quarters of RAZR users wouldn't buy a Motorola phone again. The percentage of first-time Motorola users who won't go back to the brand was 85%.

Even in the cell phone market where style is king, usability counts for a lot. Providers are finding a growing customer desire for simplicity, and not for more features packed into a ever-smaller form factor.