Love / Hate Android and Droid X

[Rob.G]

I got my DX on release day over a year ago. What an awesome phone, so much better than the POS Blackberry Storm it replaced.

The honeymoon lasted about six months. Since then, I've hated the damn thing. Stuff didn't work right. It crashed fairly often. It required a reboot to get a lot of stuff to work. Need to use hotspot? Won't start. Reboot. Need to use Bluetooth? Reboot before it works. Pick the phone up and apps would launch even though I didn't touch the screen. It would drop my Bluetooth connections at random, sometimes blaring Pandora audio at my workplace when it had been coming through my headphones.

Last Friday, the phone died. I won't say how, just that it died.

I went through Asurion and got a replacement that showed up yesterday. My first surprise was that it had Gingerbread on it. Never even saw that it had been released for the DX. The phone sure never saw the upgrade as being available. Hell it was two months after Froyo was released that it finally saw that.

So I set the phone up, reinstalled all my apps (no thanks to the Marketplace since it only remembered the ONE app I actually paid for, the rest were free), and started figuring out all the changes in Gingerbread. Some are cool, many are not. I hate how you add apps to the desktops now, very annoying. Editing contacts is nearly impossible because the keyboard won't go away, and the display jumps around. I don't care for the new bottom bar and the icon to go to All Apps being on the right and unmovable. The supposedly new and improved keyboard is worse, the auto-correct is no better (it still can't capitalize "I") and why has the .com button been gone since whatever the original OS release was???? And I can't turn off the lock screen. The setting is there, it just doesn't work. I installed No Lock, which works sometimes, but not always.

Anyway... overall, Gingerbread is a lot nicer. It does seem to be running better. It may be tolerable for a while longer.

I"ve been giving serious thought to an iPhone 5. But then I heard yesterday that it may not support LTE. If not, pass. One thing that makes me want to stay with Android is PDA Net. If I went to a Droid Bionic to get on LTE and used PDA Net with my unlimited phone data plan, I would finally have faster 'net than my 3G USB modem, which I have actual unlimited on since I've had it since 2007... Verizon has no grandfather plan to get me truly unlimited on LTE.

So... the point of this post... how is everybody else liking Gingerbread and Android in general?

Rob

 

[mpgo4th]

Love it. I had a droid 2 as my first android and was not happy with it and thought android was all hype. I went back to blackberry with a bold and was happy for a while until the reboots started and I couldnt find any apps I wanted. So I ended up buying a X used to try. The X is way better that my droid 2 and gingerbread made it even better. I still have one or two minor issues with the phone but overall its the best option out for me. NO PHONE will ever be perfect or do everything everyone wants but for me this setup is close.

 

[Rob.G]

I agree that no phone is perfect... I just want stuff that a phone is supposed to do, to work properly. I'm hopeful this new phone with Gingerbread will fix a lot of issues.

I just did an update... .602 was available so I installed it. Prior to that I had an issue where if I was listening to media via my bluetooth headset, then paused it to go listen to a voicemail, I had to power the headset off and back on before I could get media sound through it. I haven't tested that since the update, but I'm hoping it's fixed.

I also found out that Verizon's answer to the iPhone 5 is the forthcoming Droid Prime (aka Nexus Prime). If I stay with Android, that's the way I will go probably. It's supposed to launch around the same time as the iPhone 5.

One thing the phone still does that drives me nuts, is when I'm streaming with Flash via the web browser, if I navigate away from the browser for any reason, when I come back, I have to reload the website and restart the streaming. The streaming should continue even when I'm away from the browser and not pause, causing problems.

Rob