I decided to give big red a try and ordered up some Motorola Droids from Verizon Wireless.

iPhones are great, but as a techie it was time to try something new!

Initially everything was looking very promising:

The phone was fast, I mean really fast.  People have been comparing it to the iPhone 3Gs but I don’t have a 3Gs I only have a 3G.  I will say the difference in speed between the 3G and the Droid is staggering!

It only took me about 15 minutes to get completely comfortable with the Droid’s UI and pull out keyboard and maybe another 10 minutes to fully customize the phone to my liking. At this point I decided it was time to setup my email account on the Droid.

This process was painless and simple.  I quickly got the Droid connected my to Exchange 2007 server and it began syncing email, contacts and my calendar.

So far this was going very well, fast and functional! Or so I thought.

Upon completion of the sync with my Exchange 2007 server, I opened up the Email app on the Droid.

Wow was this ugly. Gray on Gray background made it hard notice a difference between read and unread messages(The picture below does not convey this well). There was no preview of the email body like on the iPhone, and I could not find a single setting to change any of this.

After further inspection of the lack of options in this regard, I began doing a thorough testing of the most basic day to day email tasks.

1. Replying to email:

Fail. While I will say that the Droid does in fact send a reply email, you would never know by glancing at your inbox.  There is no change to the message listed in your inbox, no reply arrow or “badge” showing you that something was done with this email. During a long work day dealing with many emails this gets very confusing.

2. Forwarding email:

Double Fail. First it fails for the same reason as the reply fails.  No indication that you have forwarded the message is displayed in the inbox.  However this goes one step beyond to be a double fail when dealing with attachments on the Droid.  Exchange 2007/Droid users seem to be completely unable to forward emails with attachments from the phone properly.  While the recipient does get an email, there is no message body, just an attachment message.eml.  Now this would be ok if you could open the attachment, but it is junk on the receiving end.

I thought I was crazy and that I missed something in the setup, but I did not.

As a techie I could not let this go, and began the hunt for fixes. First to the Android Market, where I downloaded a trial of Touchdown.  This apparently was the end all be all application for Exchange users on the Droid.  It however had the same issues with indicating a message had been replied to and thus was a no go for me especially at the price of $20. Touchdown had its other weaknesses but that will be for another post (maybe). This then brought me to alldroid.org. An Android development community.  There I was greated by many other incredible tech savvy people, who were also not content with their Droids for various reasons. Surely there would be answers here…..

After reading many posts I downloaded a few “Custom Roms” for the Droid and went to work flashing them to the phone and testing them out one by one hoping there would be a fix for the email deficiency. (Learn how to root your Android Phone, and Flash Custom Roms Here) Unfortunately there were no fixes for the email issues! I could make the phone faster with an overclock, I could replace the stock applications for the Gallery, Music, Launcher and more with versions from the newest Android device the Nexus One, but nothing was there to upgrade/fix the email application.

Some Googling turned up results for the Android Google Code project bug tracking site, where these issues have been clearly logged by many people.  Google has been made aware of the problems with email and Exchange servers, but on their bug tracker they are listed as confirmed, or just sitting there opened.  Is anyone assigned to these bugs? Are they being worked on?

I was very frustrated at this point, mostly due to the fact that switching to Verizon would result in a huge monthly savings because of the 18% discount I get through mynpp.com, which unfortunately does not have an agreement in place with AT&T at this time.

So what does this mean for the business user? Apparently Google designed this device to work primarily with Gmail and its other Google Apps. Everything else was secondary or tertiary with only the most basic of functionality included.

So you just got your Droid and are in your 15 or 30 day window, depending on if you have a business account or not, and you are wondering what do I do now?

If you have never owned a smart phone before you may not notice these issues and the phone will be a great performer, which seems to be the case based on the adoption rate of the Motorola Droid and the million+ handsets sold thus far. So make up your own mind.

However if you have ever used a Blackberry, Treo, Windows Mobile or iPhone for business, I am pretty sure you will be mostly disappointed.

I do see great potential for the Android OS and hope that as development and adoption rate continues these major design flaws are worked out and I can try out the next iteration of “Droid”

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