Droid Doesn't - Real Stories of Droid Fail

Here are stories sent in from Listeners that tried the Droid and found it to be less (a lot less) than marketed.  So before making a change you will want to read these stories.  There is also this post from Stewart Alsop.

I will add more of these Droid Fail stories as they come in.

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Rob,
 
Before I start - I am a technology junkie - especially when it comes to the "newest & greatest" cell phones! My friends and family laugh at me - because I am constantly upgrading my phone.
 
We have a Verizon contract (with 3 lines of service) as well as an AT&T contract (with 2 lines of service). I recently did some research comparing AT&T's plans vs Verizon's plans (voice AND data) and I decided it was more cost effective (especially when taking into account the cancellation fees for each contract) to keep the 3 Verizon lines, and cancel the AT&T contract. Besides - who really needs 2 cell phones? 
 
WHAT A MISTAKE!!!
 
I canceled my AT&T contracts the day the Droid was released. I was up early that day - and the Verizon store I went to - did have a line of people - waiting for the Droid - but the line of people (maybe 35?) ABSOLUTELY did not compare to the line at the AT&T store on the day of the IPhone 2G & IPhone 3G launch. (No one sleeping overnight in front of the store inhaling someone's car fumes - a throwback to your experience in line for your IPhone - I love that story!)
 
The HTC Droid - from initial comparison looked crisper than the IPhone. However, after further testing/use - it was HORRIBLE! We had SO many issues with the Droid - they were returned to the Verizon store 1 week after we purchased them.
 
These were the main issues we had:
1. The Droid would not voicedial from our Bluetooth headset
2. The Droid would not sync with our yahoo email accounts (hmmm ... google not syncing with their competitor yahoo - is that really a "missed kink" in the product?) :)
3. The App store SUCKS! Not user friendly AT ALL! I definitely prefer using Itunes on my PC to browse through the Apps.
4. The Droid is overly sensitive and would randomly dial people in our contact book
5. The calendar is VERY limited - granted I was finally able to sync it to my Outlook contacts/calendar - but the calendar fields were very limited - and half of my text did not appear for my activities - you know - the important stuff would be missing - half of the address, etc. HORRIBLE!
 
Unfortunately - the fact still remained that we didn't want to pay 2 cell phone bills each month - so we're still stuck with Verizon until our contracts run out - so I had to exchange the Droids for the Blackberry Storm 2 - not much better than the Droids ...
 
I hope this helps your listeners before switching out of AT&T to Verizon. Luckily - we can still use our IPhones as IPod touches @ home since we have WIFI.
 
Thanks for the great show! I love it! I've listened from episode 1!
 
Robin
Clinton Township, MI

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Hi Rob,

I was just listening to Podcast number 102 through your Tii app - I know, I'm behind.  This is because I spent the last 2 weeks on the Android platform.  I've been having so much trouble with my iPhone dropping calls, and since my cell phone is my only phone, I finally ditched the iPhone and tried out the Motorola Droid.  That began quite the saga - as a jailbroken iPhone user, the bar is set pretty high on phones.  I used the Droid for a week before returning it.  As expected, it was quite buggy - this I could have lived with while the kinks are worked out.  What surprised me is that all the customization that people talk about on Android is, well, true.  But in order to achieve that customization, you have to download apps.  It's not built into the OS.  How do you find out about these customizations?  Good question.  The search function on the Android Market is incredibly BAD.  Seriously, this is Google?  I would read about an app on the web, search for it in the Market and come up empty - 80% of the time.  On the forums people would be talking about using an app, and there would be multiple responses about people being unable to locate it in the market.  It's so bad, that the platform uses bar coding to locate apps - this is the standard for posting links to apps in Android - because it's impossible to search by Keyword or even Title.  What's perplexing is that some people could find the apps, others couldn't using the exact same search terms.
 
In the end I returned the Droid because I couldn't stand the form factor.  I'm a mom, I was afraid I'd drop the thing on my baby's head and she'd get a concussion.  The thing is a brick.  And while I wanted a physical keyboard, I can type faster on the iPhone's keyboard than on the physical Droid keyboard.  Just not feeling the love there.  I tried out the HTC Eris next - this introduced me to all kinds of issues with Android.  You know how the commercials say that Droid can multi-task while the iPhone can't?  My jailbroken iPhone of course could, but on Android, you don't get a choice about multitasking.  There are no kill buttons in the apps.  So to leave a program you press the home key and it continues to operate in the background.  If you're like me, jumping between programs fairly often, you'll have 10-12 apps running in the background at all times.  No worries though, there's an app for that - lots of them.  So you download a task killer and when you run it shows you all the apps open at the time.  You can check off the ones you want to kill at that moment in time - of course, you want to be careful not to check off things like the keyboard, the OS, the battery meter, you know, little "applications" like that.  As a kicker though, I learned that the task killer was draining my battery - I was only able to get 2-4 hours of battery on my phone.  There's a handy little setting that you can look at to see if your phone sleeps - my consistently said I was at 80-100% awake.  Sitting on my desk looking very innocuous and the damn thing's still running.  I found that my battery life was dramatically better if I used the phone than if I left it sitting.
 
In the end I returned the Eris too, and dragged my sorry butt back to AT&T.  They took me and my money back.  A part of me is disappointed that the open platform that Android offers is not really in the same universe as the iPhone.  It would be nice to have another platform to challenge and spur development on the iPhone.  What blows my mind though, is the advertising that's going on and why Apple isn't exploiting the fact that the Android OS is half-baked at best.
 
Anyway, thought you might be interested in my experience.  If you know anyone who is thinking of switching, tell them I said that making phone calls that don't drop is over-rated.  Nothing can match the iPhone experience.
 
Amanda
gadgetmom88 on Twitter.