stupid technology

we bought a new uniden cordless phone set recently, to replace the set we had that ate rechargeable batteries.

the new ones are nice, but have one same stupid flaw that the old ones did — if you call back a non-local number from caller id, i doesn’t automatically insert a “1” first, so the call does not work. this is despite the phone being programmed with our area code.

another recent annoyance is that the satellite radio on our new toyota prius only displays a few characters of text from the information about what is playing. there’s plenty of room on the screen for more, and i’m pretty certain that sirius sends more text, but it is cut off nonetheless.

getting the details right in interfaces is hard, and consumer technology companies have a lousy history of this. one of the reasons i think the iphone is going to be a huge hit is that apple generally gets the details right.