Initial Impressions

By some minor miracle, I actually received my new Droid Incredible before the 4th of July holiday. There is A LOT to learn, do, and talk about. If I were to post about everything right now, I’d have you guys sitting at the computer all day. So I’ll make this short and talk about my initial thoughts. Don’t worry though. This won’t be the last time you hear me raving about my new phone!

The first thing I noticed after taking the phone out of the box was that it fits very well in my hand and that it’s light, but not light enough to feel cheap. I like the feel of it a lot. Going through the initial setup of the phone was a piece of cake. All I had to do was follow on screen instructions and log in to my gmail account. Then all my contacts, calendar events, and emails were synced up. Beautiful. I went to work a little bit on personalizing the phone. I get 7 screens to work with, and so far I only have use for 5: Home, a favorite contacts page, calendar page, most used apps page, and a page with a few power saving widgets on it. What else? I changed the background, customized the home screen, and of course downloaded a few apps. One of my favorite things about the phone is the default HTC clock/weather widget on the home screen. Every time I unlock the phone, the current weather floats across the screen. So if it’s cloudy, clouds appear and float across the screen. If it’s sunny, the sun shines in your face, and so on. Very cool! Let me talk about a couple of the apps I downloaded…briefly! A couple games I have are mahjong and abductions (which interestingly enough is a game where cows try to jump onto different platforms in order to elevate to a UFO in the sky). Thank you to my wonderful bf for that one!   I also have the ESPN score center app which is a solid app for getting scores from any sport. It even has the famous ESPN ticker on the bottom with current news. For news, I downloaded the NY Times app, which is a solid app that will convey top stories from all different sections of the NYT and format it nicely to fit the screen. There are also a few others. A couple of apps that could be improved are the native gmail app (I want the option to turn off/on mail previews) and the native facebook app (this is possibly the most bare bones app ever and it lacks the functionality of uploading video).

There is obviously a lot more to the android platform than what I’ve just covered. I’m still learning the ins and outs of the system in terms of navigating around and finding the functionality that I want/need. This is just the beginning. As I said before, this isn’t the last time you’ll be hearing about my phone. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say when I get more acclimated. But for now, I’m lovin’ up on it and can’t wait to see what else I discover!

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July. As always please feel free to comment on anything, even if it’s not directly related to my post.

Customer Service

I bet some of you think you already know what this is about. But actually, I’m not planning about launching into an angry rant about customer service. I simply want to make a few observations and put my thoughts out there. So here goes.

Last week, the new iphone 4 came out. As usual, people were waiting in lines as much as days in advance to be among the first group to get their hands on this sexy new device. So finally launch day comes and there is massive coverage all over the internet. With that kind of coverage, you can expect that people are going to voice their opinions, good or bad. So of course there was a lot of positive feedback. Less calls are dropping, the clarity of the display is breathtaking, multi-tasking is a great new addition, etc etc. But there was also a list of negative things: proximity sensor doesn’t work, there’s a yellow discoloration on the screen, and the biggest of all: when you hold the phone a certain way, all your reception bars disappear and you lose service and the ability to browse the internet. I will come back to this.

The HTC Droid Incredible has been a hit since it first hit stores at the end of April. In fact, multiple Verizon reps have told me that all the handsets sold out on the first day and they haven’t been in stock since. I believe it because I’m one of those impatient people who is waiting to get my hands on this phone. Everyday that I’ve checked Verizon’s website, the ship date gets pushed back. Every time that I call Verizon, the robotic reps look at their chart and tell me that based on the date of order, my phone should ship by June 29. It’s June 30th at night and still no tracking number for me. I know what is holding up the process, but that’s not much consolation. Then earlier today, an email comes out to all people who have the Incredible on backorder. It says that shipping could be delayed another 7 business days (which essentially means a week and a half) because of inventory shortages. Annoying, but let’s move on.

Let’s talk about customer service. When you think of a phone losing reception, you immediately think that the carrier is having network issues. It’s the first thing that comes to mind because they provide the cell service. But with this new iphone, the dwindling reception issues are actually a pretty serious design flaw, regardless of whether it’s the hardware or software. This is Apple’s fault, not AT&T’s (for once…). But I would bet that there are many people out there who just want to crucify AT&T because they haven’t read about this problem and they immediately associate network problems as being the carrier’s fault. I actually feel a little bad for AT&T, but let’s go back to apple. For those of you who live under a rock, Apple’s response to the reception problem was, “You’re holding it wrong.” Yes, they actually had the balls to say that to people. Then to make matters worse, they released instructions to their employees telling them how to deal with disgruntled customers on the phone. This document was leaked onto the internet and was capped off by telling employees not to offer any freebies to customers to remedy the issue. That my friends, is BAD customer service.

There are plenty of impatient people waiting for their Incredibles to arrive at their doorsteps. I’m one of them. I’ve called Verizon a number of times and while they’ve been nice, they haven’t exactly been helpful. They told me about the screen shortages that have been holding up production, but I already knew that. I just wanted to know when the phone would ship. I can’t back this up with certainty, but I’d imagine that HTC is not hearing too much from people about the phone because people are ordering it through Verizon, which puts the ball in Verizon’s court. So with regards to that email I spoke about before, in addition to telling people about additional shipping delays, Verizon apologized to the customers and offered a $25 gift card as a token of their gratitude for the continuing patience of the customers. Now that is GOOD customer service. Still, I want my phone Verizon!

Ok, this post got really long. I hope you all enjoyed my little novel.