Verizon and their ****** Company

[BadWolf03]

I got <deleted> several times over Droids in a ten-week period.  I upgraded to the Droid Bionic last fall (it was the only 4G with a dual-core CPU and Android 2.3.x.    After ten weeks of light use, the touchscreen simply stopped responding.  It lost its capacitive ability.  I could see everything on the screen, but couldn't activate anything.  Whenever it rang, I couldn't accept the call.  So I took it in to a Verizon Wireless store in mid-december and they said they could replace it, but told me that a second upgrade to the Droid RAZR would be a smarter idea, since, according to them, the Bionic was not going to receive ICS, but the RAZR would.  They even told me that Motorola had an agreement with Google that the Samsung Nexus would have a six-week exclusive lead, and then the RAZR was the ONLY other Verizon phone scheduled for ICS - and that it would be installed in mid- or late- January. The manager advised me not to get the Samsung, but to go with the RAZR (I have since learned that all of the managers were aware of the January release date for the RAZR MAXX, but he never mentioned that there was any upgrade on the way.  So, after paying $199 for the Bionic only ten weeks earlier, I coughed up an additional $299 to upgrade to the RAZR.  Then, the next day, I discovered that the clerk had packed my Bionic box with the charger and all accessories, but had neglected to put the actual phone in the box. I called the store, but the manager was not in that day, and the assistant manager and clerks searched the office and back rooms thoroughly without finding my Bionic (which I had already paid $199 for and which still had my self-installed 32GB microSD chip in it with all of my data. I was able to reach the manager the next day, and they instituted a second search and also checked whether the phone had been sent to the warehouse - zip.

I didn't upload my data first because I don't trust any of the carriers and wanted to minimize their ability to "mine" my phone, and second, because I was planning to switch the 32GB card with the 16GB card that came in the new RAZR, and you can still offload data from a deactivated phone via your PC, so losing the phone was the only way I would lose the data.

So, I'm still trying to get satisfaction over the Bionic and my own self-purchased 32GB chip that the clerk "lost," and I have yet to get compensated for.  I was on the Customer Service line as recently as this week, asking if I could at least have the $199 applied to my current account, and also asking them to send me a 32GB microSD to replace the one they failed to return to me.  They always promise me they will escalate the matter, and I have escalated it through at least two levels of CSR supervisors without any result over the intervening months.  The last call resulted in the CSR telling me she was going to start by talking to the manager of the store (even though I told her I had talked to the manager three days after the phone disappeared and had even gone back to the store twice to speak face-to-face with him).  So, we're five months down the road, and I am back where I started.

So, the result so far:

1) The store manager talked me out of the Samsung already loaded with ICS.

2) The manager knew, but did not tell me, that in a couple of weeks, the RAZR MAXX with the 3300 mAh battery was due out in a couple of weeks.  I could have reactivated my HTC Eris for a couple of weeks and then gone back for the MAXX, had I been told.

3. VerizonWireless (through carelessness or a clerk's intent) stole from me a phone I had paid $199 for and a 32GB chip I had also paid for.

4. The manager had lied to me about when ICS was being released on the RAZR and that it wouldn't be released on the Bionic (it will).

5. During calls to both CS and the tech line, I was subsequently informed that ICS would be out later in the first quarter, April 4th (my birthday, as it happens), and now Motorola's website has a "News Byte" by their Senior VP for Software and Services Product Management explaining how difficult it is to implement a radically new OS and promising release in the second quarter (already two-thirds over).   And yet, I've seen an ICS release schedule on Motorola's web site that indicates that just about all of their foreign ICS-capable phones and tablets have already been converted (especially in emerging markets like China), while every single domestic Motorola phone is listed as being in the earliest of their four-stage development cycle (evaluation and planning) and all of the domestic phones list the release date as "undetermined."

Given that Motorola has had the ICS codebase for at least 6 months, I've seen ICS working on RAZRs with custom kernals, and even seen a Motorola demo of a RAZR running ICS, the only conclusion I can come to is that, like most other multi-national corporations, Motorola is more interested in satisfying its emerging countries' new middle classes as a market than in the disappearing American middle class.  We're last on the list.

I've been with Verizon since the earliest days of hard-mounted car phones and window antennas.  I have never had trouble with them (outside of the fact that their prices are getting out of line with their competition) until now.  And now, everything is going wrong.

Message was edited by: Verizon Moderator