ChrisPosterous

Within the next day or two, I plan on dumping the Motorola Backflip and going back to my iPhone 3G (albeit a few days earlier than planned). The great Android experiment of 2010 is ending unceremoniously as the phone and software abomination I have been toting around for just two weeks has finally gotten on my last nerve. Not sure if its the 3 hour battery (my Netbook does better), the flaky phone functionality, or the Task Killer that I hate the most. But it did have a killer 5MP camera that worked wonderfully (the only thing I liked unfortunately).

Now don't get me wrong, Android 2.2 is a promising operating system. I can see why people can get excited about it - I certainly did. But yours truly will never know the sweet goodness of Froyo as the Android phone I picked will never be able to run it. And the version it does run (1.5) is old and half baked at best. Sure there were some good apps - Seesmic for example is one, Twit.tv (for free), a nice Pandora implementation, and all those tasty widgets. But the offerings on the iPhone are simply more polished and less "amateurish" in feel. And a few that I really wanted to try were Android 2.1 only (like the official Twitter app). Widgets are fun, for the first couple of days. Then you realize they are sitting there eating your battery while you sleep (or walk, or drive or work, or do anything for that matter). And removing them makes the phone a poor knockoff of every other smart phone that isn't an Android or iOS device.

Many of the problems and issues I experienced the last two weeks were the result of Motorola making a lousy phone and AT&T doing their best to further cripple it with an old OS and no clear upgrade path (and "Planned for Q3" is not my idea of clear). But this is a perfect example why the Android ecosystem is so strange. Sure there are lots of manufacturers making lots of phones (which makes the number of units sold look awesome compared to one manufacturer making one phone) but this is the problem - they all roll their own solution in one way or another, and if you choose unwisely, you are stuck with an albatross.

In general. everything I could run on the handset had a horrible early-DOS quality, which would not be bad 3 years ago, but is horrible in today's App Store dominated world. Moving from home page to home page is slow and laggy. And apps routinely just quit mid-work. Not good for an SMS app for example when it crashes mid message. And lord help you if your phone rings while you struggle with the apps. I was unable to answer 1 out of every 3 calls due to some unknown system process in the background, widgets hogging memory and the slow response of the "answer slider" control. Oh, and I certainly won't miss the Task Killer - you know there is something wrong when the first app people recommend you install is an app killer to prevent memory problems. Good grief.

As a phone, the Backflip is a terrible phone. Signal quality is terrible no matter how you hold the phone. Where my wife routinely had 5 bars on her iPhone, I had 1 or 2. And 3G hardly ever worked. Maybe a bad/defective phone? Probably not as the majority of Backflip owners reported the same issues on the various owner forums.

So, tomorrow or Friday, I'll be visiting Gazelle and selling this brick and going back to a phone whose quirks I can understand and live with, even if it is a 2 year old iPhone 3G. Guess I am just not cut out for the Android/Open Source/Tinker-to-death phone crowd. Frankly, I just want to make calls, check twitter go about my business. I already spend too much time "managing" my PC's, I don't need to do the same to keep my phone up and running.