My old cell phone was awesome. It got a signal almost everywhere and it had a couple of features that I took for granted until I got my new cell phone.
One feature on my old phone actually annoyed me at first but I quickly saw the wisdom of it: the alarm, once set, would ring even if the phone was turned off. So you could turn off your phone to sleep, which means you wouldn’t get any calls, but you’d still be awoken at the correct time.
My new phone is unusable in this area: you must leave the phone on else the alarm never sounds (meaning you get calls in the middle of the night whether you want them or not). Worse: the phone does not allow you to set an alarm unless it is “in service area”. In other words, it must connect to the phone network before you can even set the alarm. Maybe it doesn’t know what time it is until it gets the current time from the network.
My old phone would keep the time always and just update whenever it could get the correct time from the network. To top it all off, my new phone gets significantly worse reception so the likelihood of being connected to the network at any point is much lower than it was on my old one.
I wonder if product designers actually use their products before releasing them to the public.