greggman's dashboard

First off, it has these 2 3 way buttons on either side of the directional pad that are way too easy to press in the wrong direction. (almost effectively making it 3 directional pads in a row). It's EXTREMELY easy to press the wrong one by accident.

Next, one of them, the right one, pressing it down is the "CLEAR" button. For some reason it's super easy to press and almost NEVER what you want. Maybe it's 7 years of Japanese phones but even after having had the phone for 10 months I still press it all the time. I'm looking at my call list, I press there and it's like "Delete this call?". NO I DON'T WANT TO DELETE THIS CALL! I can't imagine there are that many people in the world that want to delete calls from their call list unless they are spys or having affairs.

It doesn't matter what you are looking at, press that button and "Delete ___ ?" appears. Pictures, Addresses, EMail, anything. This function should NOT be on a button.

Next stupid issue. It's a Walkman. It plays MP3s. They have about 10 songs IN THE ROM and you can't get rid of them. Add your own music and put it on shuffle and it will still play these lame built in songs. Now, I don't have any desire to use the thing as a walkman but even then there is no turning off the feature so if I accidentally hit the play button on the side of the phone off it goes playing these built in songs. This happens a couple of times a week :-( If I can't remove them let me at least mark them so they never get played.

Next one, You can't adjust the time for the backlight to turn off. A couple of months ago I downloaded the free operamini browser (http://www.operamini.com/). Now at least browsing doesn't suck like it did with the built in browser. In fact it's pretty awesome because it does a really good job at reformatting the pages in a readable way for at least my favorite sites (sorry, no Japanese characters :-( ) But, the stupid backlight is default timed to time out almost exactly 3-5 seconds before I can read a full screen of text. If I could increase it like any phone I've owned previously I could set it 5-10 seconds longer and the light wouldn't be constantly going out while I'm on the throne.

Last one, Pressing down on the left 3 way button = back. Back in the browser, back to the previous menu etc. Press it while entering an email and you're screwed. You get asked "Save Message in Drafts?" (yes, no). Picking yes saves the message in drafts which you have to then go dig out 4-5 steps away, Picking No you lose your message. Pressing "back" as in cancel is the same as picking no. There is no recovery just back to editing the message. This button gets pressed by accident all the time. WTF were they thinking?

They clearly weren't

I picked up the KDL-46XBR3. It looks fine but there's a few annoying poor design decisions.

#1) You can name all your inputs so instead of Video1, Video2, etc they can be XBOX, 360, PC3, Wii etc. That's great. Once setup that makes it far easier to use since you don't have to remember which video-in a certain piece of hardware is connected to. But, you can't name the VGA input. It is always listed as PC even though I have my 360 connected there. Why? It was more work to make PC not editble than to just have everything be editable. That's a stupid decision.

#2) You can turn off any input you are not using. That way when going through the menus of inputs or using the input button those inputs will not come up. This is important for a TV with 9 inputs. But, you can't turn off the Antenna/Cable input. I'm not using my Antenna/Cable input. My cable, like I'm sure most people who own this TV, is connected through HDMI so I really NEVER want the Antenna input to show up EVER!!!! It's especially frustrating for my non-tech friends and family. There is no reason they would ever want to choose "Antenna" since nothing is hooked up there. Since you can turn off the other inputs you should be able to turn off Antenna.

#3) Pressing "Menu" brings up the list of inputs which is great. They are all labelled (see #1) and it makes it easy to select and easy to explain how to use the TV to your non-techie friend (press menu, pick the input you want, ie "Wii"). Except, if you happen to be on VGA (PC) input the menu button no longer works. In order to get to any other input from VGA input you first have to press the input button which will cycle you to the next input. That next input is Antenna always (see #2), then you can finally press Menu to bring up the list of inputs you originally wanted. Again, really stupid.

I'm not saying the TV sucks. It's a great TV and I'm happy I bought it. It's just stupid these lame choices they made. Thinking that everyone would use the Antenna input, not letting you label the VGA input, not having the menu button work in VGA mode. What were they thinking? (hint: they weren't)

What makes this even more frustrating is it's 100% a software problem. A simple reflashing an eprom inside the TV could fix all of these issues for free.