Phoning it in 20 Sep 2006

"To listen to the MP3s you've downloaded:

1. Hit the MENU button
2. Find the ON DEMAND menu item (I demand to hear MP3s!)
3. Nope, that's not what you wanted
4. Hit BACK
5. Nothing happens (darn!)
6. OK, try END
7. Do you want to exit this application?
8. YES is already highlighted. Click OK.
9. Huh? The application didn't exit.
10. Click END again.
11. YES is already highlighted...oh...wait a minute! Maybe NO is highlighted? There's no way to tell the difference. There are two choices, one is white and one is blue, it's hard to see which is highlighted.
12. Fool around with the cursor keys until you're pretty sure that YES is highlighted. This is confusing, because the two-item menu wraps around, so the up button moves down and the down button moves up, or vice versa.
13. Remove the battery and put it in again. That should get you back to the main menu.
14. Media player? Is that what you want?
15. Yeah, there's something in here called Music...
16. It has about 50 options. What do they mean? SIRIUS hits? MUSIC CHOICE? SIRIUS MUSIC? Some of them are listed as My Channels and some are listed as Available Channels. Which is which? The UI here is really getting confusing.
17. OK, none of those options lets you listen to MP3s. It turns out there's something called MUSIC on the Main Menu.
18. Ahh, that brings up the happy "booting Java" screen which is so heartwarming. Thank you Sun Microsystems for bringing programming language advertisements into consumer electronics.
19. The Java applet has two tabs, "Store" and "Player." Try buying a song. It's $5 for 3 songs. That's a ripoff, Sprint. Apple already established that the fair price for one song is $0.99.
20. OK, I just want to listen to Leo Laporte, dammit. Maybe the Player tab?
21. Gotta choose between "All My Music" and "Create Playlist...".
22. W00t! THERE'S TWiT!
23. Click on it, and listen to TWiT."

Read Spolsky's review in full here (via Daring Fireball)