I was working onsite at the late, unlamented SEMC on some mobile phone software, and I was talking to someone about my PEBL. Lovely hardware, I said. Terrible s

I was working onsite at the late, unlamented SEMC on some mobile phone software, and I was talking to someone about my PEBL. Lovely hardware, I said. Terrible software, I said. Painful-to-use UI where nothing is findable, it's slow, functionality is poor and it looks ugly, I said. Compare it with the Nokia 6310i, I said. I may have ranted a little. Yes, he said. He had headed the team who wrote the software for the RAZR/PEBL line. He cut me off after I started apologising, saying that he agreed with everything I had said. Motorola had subcontracted out development to the company he'd worked for, and had provided a detail specification as to exactly what they wanted. What they wanted was simply bad: every UI design misfeature was deliberately designed in. The team would raise bugs along the lines of 'navigating menus takes ages. There needs to be a way to jump directly to a menu item --- you know, like Nokia has' or 'even after weeks of using the product our testing team still get lost inside the settings menu', and they'd always be closed as Works As Intended. Nobody cared. But the hardware was beautiful. Robust, excellent battery life, felt good in the hand, well made, lots of nice attention to detail --- the PEBL's magnetic latch was a masterpiece. If only they'd put the same care into the software stack.