Sunday Rant - Asking For Too Much From Verizon? [UPDATED]

As I was standing in line at the Verizon corporate store in Sioux Falls yesterday waiting to replace my Thunderbolt (for the last time!) it hit me. Are we really asking for too much when we buy a phone to actually get a product that works?

Obviously any phone you choose will make and receive phone calls out of the box, though some may dispute even that notion, but considering we pay anywhere up to $300 for a phone and then an extra $30 a month for a pipe to the internet, shouldn't we get a finished product in return?

Take my HTC Thunderbolt for instance. From day one it seemed obvious to me that this thing was not ready for prime time. Sure it looks great and is one of the fastest phones on the market but shouldn't one expect a $249 along with a 2 year obligation "portable" phone to actually be portable? How is being tethered to a charger because of a 5-6 hour battery life portable? Believe it or not my workday is a bit longer than that so shouldn't my portable phone at a minimum be able to get me through that workday? I guess not

Also shouldn't one expect one's internet enabled smart phone to actually be connected to the internet? Again apparently HTC thought that wasn't the case as my Thunderbolt would decide at various times during the day that it's data connection wasn't needed and for some reason would shut down requiring a reboot to turn it back on.

Speaking of reboots, besides the fact that a reboot with the Thunderbolt is a seemingly endless process taking several minutes to complete, HTC has made it easy for you to perform that action.The Thunderbolt does it all for you rebooting several times a day all on its own usually at the worst times imaginable, you know like in the middle of a phone call.

Now before someone says the obvious that it was just a bad phone, let me say that forums are full of people all with the same complaints and after going through 2 phones myself with the same problems I would have say that it is not an isolated issue. In fact HTC just pushed out an update that was supposed to fix the data connection issue, which in my experience it didn't by the way and actually made my rebooting issue worse!

So there I was at the Verizon store once again trying to find a phone that meets a certain set of standards. You know something that gets me through a full day without having to charge it, makes phone calls, stays connected to the internet, and above all stays turned on. Is that asking for too much for ones money? We'll see.

I now have my Thunderbolt sitting on my desk doing what it does do well, being a paperweight, while I setup its replacement, the Incredible 2 which believe it or not early on is also giving cause for concern besides the obvious fact that I just wasted my last available upgrade only a little over a month after using one. I'll give HTC's latest Verizon phone a few days before getting too worried but stay tuned for more on that in the near future.

Anyone want to buy a paperweight Thunderbolt?

UPDATE 5/23: Further highlighting the issue, my Incredible 2 would lose cell signal consistently at my house so back it went to Verizon. Instead of pressing my luck with a different Incredible or another handset I decided to root my Thunderbolt and loaded the BAMF Remix v1.6.3 ROM. So far I have yet to experience 1 reboot and my battery life has been amazing (Ok, not really but by Thunderbolt standards it has been).