Snozberry

I grudgingly signed up for another two years with Verizon Wireless and picked up a Motorola E815 phone in the process. The phone's okay, but I have a few complaints. I'm going to leave out comments about disabled features, and instead just focus on the usability of the phone:

• The earpiece doesn't seem to dynamically adjust its volume like my old Kyocera 2235.
• The contact list doesn't have entries for people, but rather numbers. That means two separate entries like Jenny Mobile & Jenny Work in the contact list. This is not how people organize or think about contacts. UPDATE: So, it's bad, but not the end of the world. If you use voice dialing, you can say "Call Jenny Mobile" and it will call the mobile phone number. Why not have the UI match the functionality (i.e. present the information in the same way it is accessed verbally)?
• There is no dynamically created list of "frequent contacts" at the top of the contact list.
• There is no call duration timer; when you're making a call, you have no easy way of figuring out how long it's been for! UPDATE: I found the setting to enable the call timer. I vote bad default setting.
• The outside LCD screen is damn near impossible to read without its backlight on - both indoors and in sunlight. If it has to be color, why not use a transflective screen?
• You can't set the clock to 24 hour time. This one's minor, but that's the format clock I prefer. UPDATE: Check the comments for the fix to this annoyance. Thanks AWolf.
• The phone feels physically large and relatively heavy.
• The antenna stub sticks out waaay too far. To me, it seems as if there's more than enough room to have positioned the same screw-in antenna assembly so that it basically didn't protrude from the top of the phone at all.
• Removing the battery cover required me to injure my thumb nail (I don't have wimpy nails) and craft a small lever tool out of a pen cap.
• I've never been a particularly huge fan of flip phones, but this one's earpiece seems especially uncomfortable against the side of my head.
• The various status icons along the top of the screens (inside and out) are not intuitive and too small. Especially on the outside screen, there's a massive amount of wasted screen space. I don't want to have to bring the phone up to my face to see how much reception I'm getting, or how much battery I have left - for goodness sakes, make the damn icons bigger! If you make them larger and with more components, they could also communicate the phone's status at a higher fidelity. I guess nobody at Motorola noticed because you can't see the screen, anyhow.
• It's too easy, yet not easy enough, to change the ringer mode. When the phone is closed, just bumping the side buttons will change the ringer mode, often to silent. When the phone is open, the ringer menu is so buried I created a shortcut to it.

In all, I have to say that for such a modern, fancy phone I'm remarkably unimpressed with the usability of the device. This device makes my old Kyocera feel as if it had a dream interface! The added features are nice (bluetooth dial-up is awesome!), but I'm kind of worried about how nice this phone will be to use on a day-to-day basis.