[Cleo]

I started this thread top talk about what if any impact smartphones and Christams gifts would have but since it has turned into this smartphone is better than that smartphone...

Droid Doesn’t: It’s Not Ready For Prime Time

The Motorola Droid is truly terrible, in part because it has such promise (and has been amazingly well reviewed — I worry I’m missing something). Ironically, most of the blame for the cruddiness of the phone really should be laid at Google’s feet, not Motorola’s.

The hardware (which is Motorola’s) mostly works. The keyboard is horrible and I’ve never used it, which means that it is a real design flaw given how much weight and mechanical operation it adds to the device. (The software keyboard works well enough that I’ve found it adequate but the other problems with the software make it barely useable.) The camera button on my Droid doesn’t work and never has, so I call up the camera from the home screen. The on-off button is poorly placed for one-handed operation and requires real force to actuate. But this is just version 1.0 issues that Motorola will likely fix next time out.

The software (Google’s Android plus apps both from Google and from other developers) doesn’t work and is unacceptable on a mobile device. First, the operating system doesn’t work well enough to be considered a mobile OS. A mobile phone needs to have an OS that is really tied down and ready to perform at all times, like for receiving phone calls. This one isn’t. The process management in the OS stinks. Press on an app icon; maybe it will come up and maybe the phone will just not respond. Who’s to know why? Try pressing on the phone icon at 70 mph and have it not respond. Then try pressing again. And then get a message something like: “Activity Home (in process android.process.acore) is not responding.” Force Quit or Wait. Oops! I just drove into the guy in front of me when he slowed down and now I’m dead!

I’m not actually joking. The software is so bad that, for instance, when you open the phone app and click on search, there are multiple opportunities for the software to not respond or to respond incorrectly, which means that the phone is not useable unless you are starting intently at it and very, very patient about waiting for something to happen. If you want to search your contacts, you type the first letter and the phone will stop responding for 20-30 seconds. Don’t know why. If you keep typing ahead, you get no feedback about what you’re typing until the phone responds, and then you will likely have typed the wrong things so you have to start over again. It’s very, very unpleasant experience, particularly when you think that the search function must have been made by Google engineers, who have made billions of dollars with very fast, efficient, satisfying search on the web.

I have missed calls, lost calls, misdialed calls, pocket dialed people, and had many other experiences in the last month that have lead me to conclude that the Droid is not suited to its intended purpose as a smart phone.

I have been using my iPhone in parallel (but with a different phone number, of course) and I replaced my Blackberry Tour with the Droid. I can say definitively that the iPhone and Blackberry devices have never gotten in the way of making or receiving phone calls, but the Droid actually makes it harder to make phone calls than the other devices. The phone app crashes or suspends. The bluetooth fails to connect in my car. The camera often overtaxes the device and cannot process the images fast enough to actually capture what you have snapped in about a third of the photos. If you get the picture you want and then went to send it by email, the process of creating the email, finding the address of the person you want to send to, and actually sending the photo can take as much as 5 minutes, including the wait times the phone forces on you. In fact, the first photo I sent of my new grandson from the delivery room was only partially rendered. You can imagine how I feel about my Droid when it caused my very human desire to brag about my new grandson to fail.

I can go on and on, but after a month of using the phone (or trying really hard to use it) as my primary device, I have concluded that it’s a bad product and I have to get rid of it. It is plenty clear that Motorola was so desperate to get it on the market that it didn’t take time to test it properly and pushed or pulled Google into releasing crappy software on it.

I am open to suggestions for what device should replace my Motorola Droid, which has turned out to be a real piece of crud. I want a device on Verizon and already have an iPhone on AT&T. I’m not willing to wait for Motorola to fix the Droid or for Verizon to do a deal with Apple for a new iPhone. I have been thinking that maybe I should port my main phone number to my iPhone and just stop carrying two devices. What do you think I should do?