Smartphones

Just what I think is going to be a quick one tonight.  This is something that I've been experiencing for a while.


I was an adopter of the first Motorola Droid, commonly called the Original Droid or OG Droid.  It was a great experience until the number of apps started to climb and memory began to run low.  At that point the phone began to get very slow and almost unusable.  I started looking to find out when it would be upgraded to the Gingerbread just to find out that Motorola was ending upgrades for it.  The reason for the interest in the upgrade was because of the promise of better memory management.  Just what I needed to be able to have a useful phone again.



Now I understand that at some point the hardware is no longer capable of supporting the OS upgrades but this was less than 2 years after I purchased it (in fact, it was sold for another month or two after I purchased it).  And what made it worse was the fact that custom ROMs had existed running Gingerbread for a few months before I started looking.  So at that point I decided to go with the custom ROM.  Boy what a difference!  Suddenly I had a ton of space, even after adding more apps than what I had before!  But beyond that, the phone once again became very pleasing again.  To the point that when I rooted my wife's phone she really noticed the difference even though most of her use was only texting, email, and Facebook.  So why was it so difficult for Motorola and Verizon to upgrade it?  The simple answer would be that they wanted me to upgrade.  But once again I was getting to the point that the memory was getting low but there wasn't anything that I could really remove.  The phone, once again, began to slow and become unusable.  Unfortunately, it was really at it's limits this time, but my 2 years was done.


After much research, I decided that the best phone to get would be the Galaxy Nexus because it was not loaded with the bloatware of all the rest and the Nexus line, being the flagship from Google, normally get the fastest upgrades with new releases.  Now I am very satisfied with the phone as a whole but there is one nagging issue that I have.  On an irregular basis the phone reboots itself.  There is no rhyme or reason to the reboot (incidentally, it happens on my wife's Galaxy Nexus also - couldn't upgrade mine without hers).  So I decided to do a little searching online to see if anyone else was having the issue.  Amazingly people have been having this issue since December!  Why hasn't this been fixed?


I suppose I wouldn't be so upset if there was a statement by Google saying it was an issue and that they were working on it.  But I didn't find anything.  No Google response to any of the posts, no official statement that there was an issue, nothing!  I understand that there are a lot of lines of code but come on.


But let's not make this all about the Google Nexus line of phones.  Let's include all of the top-of-the-line phones that came out in December.  These phones haven't even been upgraded to ICS yet!  There is no excuse for it other than they feel they need to put their custom "skin" on it.  These "skins" are the root of most issues with the length of time between upgrade release by Google and push to the phone by the manufacturer.


At this point, some of you will say that this is a good reason to go with an iPhone.  But that platform isn't perfect either.  OS upgrades are too far apart.  It is too the point that in a matter of just a couple of years Android has gone from playing catch-up to leading the way.  Some may say that Apple supports their phones longer and that may be true for the time being.