I've been surrounded by technology my entire life. It started, as far as I can recall, with a VIC-20 and escalated rapidly from there. Now, if you were to walk into my "man cave", you would be surrounded by a rather dense panoply of outdated but impressive gadgets. Everything from ancient tube amplifiers, oscilloscopes, Jensen Alnico speakers, a random 16mm projector, older camera equipment, microphones that were probably born before my parents, and so on. Its all here, together, and much of it in use.
I rather enjoy technology. I enjoy watching it advance and change. But there is something about the latest batch of "current" tech that bothers the hell out of me. None of it works.
A brief description of what I'm referring to may be in order.
I travel in my car quite a bit during the week. Currently its about 14-15 hours per week, and usually 7 hours at a time. As you can imagine this leads to a need for entertainment while driving. Pandora is a fantastic source but lately I've been expanding into TED and other such educational lectures. My car connects to my phone via a bluetooth interface.
For reference I'm running an HTC Evo3D. Latest Android on it - so right now we are talking Gingerbread.
Now the trouble begins.
Okay so I'm connected! And my phone clearly knows that the bluetooth connection is a "media" connection - just speakers and no mic. Oh. Oh why is it automatically playing music? I don't want it to do that. I just want it to connect. Just. Connect. Do NOT autoplay. How do I shut that off? Oh I can't? Like literally no way to stop it from autoplaying?
I've searched. So far the solution is: root and put a different ROM on the phone, or remove your SD card and erase all other audio files so it doesn't have anything to play.
Those are the solutions. That's it.
Now that is merely annoying. But wait it gets better. You might think that since the phone knows the device its connected to doesn't have a mic it *may* use the phone's mic when placing a call or otherwise trying to do some type of voice command. Not so. When I'm connected to my car's media device my phone mutes the mic input - in other words I have to plug in a headset if I want to make or take a call.
But wait - there's more.
I thought that if I got a bluetooth headset it would all work itself out. My phone would use the headset for voice commands and phone calls, and route everything else to the media connection of my car. Oh if only! And why should it do that? Why should it work in such a way that makes sense? Oh i don't know. Call it hopeless optimism. My Palm equipment worked. It just *worked*. This android? It doesn't work. Ever.
No. When i connect my headset and my car.. all hell breaks loose. It DOESN'T take voice commands from my headset. In fact phone calls are the only thing that gets routed to it, that I can tell. Unless I'm *on* a phone call and then my navigation gets routed to the earpiece as well. Trying to have a conversation and my phone is screaming GPS commands into my ear so loudly I have to throw the earpiece on the floor. What gives?
And then the kicker - when I hang up the phone does not reroute Pandora or any other audio back to the car media connection. Nope. In fact I have to RESET MY PHONE to get it to route sound back out.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I've only been talking about bluetooth issues. And as frustrating and distracting as that issue is there are other "features" that are equally maddening. The inconsistent landscape modes (some apps have no landscape modes, others are one or the other depending on if I'm selecting a video or watching one... try selecting something written sideways in a tiny font while driving a car.), the inability to easily close or select between open programs, the fact that sometimes it simply will not charge until I reset.
I could go on for hours about this. Here's another thing - there is a minimum of 7 steps, that is 7 different things to click on, to get from a search for an address to actually having it navigate you there.
The sheer uselessness of this phone is staggering. It simply, plainly, and against all logic, doesn't function. It is a barrier to function in fact. A thick line of red tape ala the DMV. I long for the days when things worked.
