I just posted this review over on the Sprint forum for my Photon 4G, but dont really expect any answers to my problems there. This is probably a better place for these issues so I am reposting here and would love to see if anyone has any idea's about how I can get over these issues and start trying to love Android like everyone else seems to...
It was time to replace my Palm Pre and Sprint stopped carrying Palm/HP devices except the two year old Pixi, so it appeared to me that this phone was the best choice, especially given its emphasis as a business phone. The phone itself seems to be put together pretty well, its light and feels good in the hand. I needed to make sure the phone I got had a notification light so that when new emails or texts came in, I would be notified. This was one of the few Android phones that has a notification light without resorting to something downloaded from the Android market that makes the camera flash to notify you. I had seen mixed reviews on those and did not want to chance it that it would not work. The problem is the notification light is so small you really have to squint to see it when its flashing, so this turned out to be a disappointment. I have 1 corporate exchange email account, 2 gmail accounts, 1 yahoo account, and 1 home email account so I wanted to make sure the phone had something similar to the Universal inbox I had with my Palm Pre. It claims it does, and they are mostly right, except that for some reason on an Android phone, the Gmail account has to be kept separate!!! Emails sent to the Gmail account will not show up in your "Universal Inbox" and to further confuse you, you can?t even place the gmail account icon inside the Messaging icon on your home screen so checking emails requires multiple taps and navigation to make sure you are up to date on all your emails. I am not allowed to forward corporate emails to a gmail account, so while I have had that suggested to me that I just forward everything to gmail, it is really not an option. At least you get notifications in one place, that is a good start, but this is a far cry from what my two year old Palm Pre could do or my wife's Blackberry. And to add insult to injury, this business phone will not allow you to accept meeting invitations sent from a corporate exchange account. Apparently this is a known limitation with Motorola and Android (or maybe just Android in general). I have been told I can go and download a $20 app to do this, but then what point is my Universal Inbox? Also, I use folders on my corporate exchange account to file away important information. The problem is that you can only choose from default sync amounts of 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, or 30 days. Most of the stuff I file away (in a how to folder for example) is more than 30 days old. There is no way to set it to get all the email in my corporate exchange folder past 30 days. So I am therefore unable to read any of those important emails. Again, not a problem on my Palm Pre.
The calendar app has also tripped me up a few times. It does sync the calendar on all my accounts, but it has this odd behavior of showing you the last date you looked at whenever you open it up. More than once I have opened it up and looked over my appointments for the day only to discover I was looking at the wrong date. The behavior I am used to is when you open up the calendar app, it shows you today, not yesterday, or tomorrow. I think I can attribute this to user error (my problem) but it does seem un-natural to me. One of the things I miss about the Palm Pre was that the calendar icon on the home screen always showed me todays date. This was so handy when filling out paperwork. The one on this phone always says ?31?. I can go download some widgets to personalize this to my heart?s content I suppose, but I am really trying to limit how much I install given all the attention paid to having to get a task killer and other apps to manage your phone and battery life. I was also shocked to see the Help Center topic on Performance recommended that I reboot my phone every day. I rebooted my Palm Pre maybe 10 times the whole 2.5 years I had it. Why do I need to reboot my phone every day? This phone (and I think really Android in general) kind of take over your life, requiring constant attention and extra taps to get everything done. I have plenty of other things to focus on, I needed a phone that helps me get things done so I can focus on my job and family, not my phone.
I also have had several issues with the Bluetooth, wifi, and 4g connection. I have a Motorola T505 Bluetooth receiver in my car. It pairs just fine, but when I leave the car, go in to pick up my kids at the daycare, and then come back out again, it refuses to pair back up automatically. I have to take the phone out of my pocket, turn the Bluetooth off and then back on again. I find myself having to fiddle with this phone constantly. I never had to do this with the Palm Pre, it just worked. I seem to have a similar issue with wifi. When I am in the office, I have the phone using the wifi. If I go next door to go to the gym and step out of wifi range, but not far enough out of range, it reports connection errors but refuses to switch over to 3G/4G. If I go a lot farther away and wait 5 minutes, this problem goes away, but not before getting a notification that there was a problem connecting. There is strong 3G signal everywhere I operate, so I know it?s not a signal strength issue with 3G. I have found that I have to just turn off Wifi and Bluetooth to reliably receive my emails. This seems crazy to me given the great wifi speeds I can get in the office and I am pretty sure Sprint would rather I use Wifi for all my emails instead of their 3G network.
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