droidStory

A number of web sites report a possible target date for Verizon’s first OTA (Over the Air) update for the Motorola Droid and HTC Eris in early December, followed by a second update in January. This is both good and bad news.

To start with the good news: Both Verizon and Motorola are feverishly working on resolving the problems that have surfaced since the official launch of Droid one week ago.  Perhaps Verizon has learned from the horrendous BB Storm launch experience last year. Most of the early Storm customers (me included) had to endure many months of waiting for much-needed patches, causing a significant return rate of the BB phone. Still, there is no official release date yet and the update could get stuck in Verizon’s approval process the same way we saw with the Storm.

Now to the bad news: There is a growing list of known issues and bugs, which makes you wonder if the phone was released a bit too early.  Many problems have to do with usability quirks that should be easily fixed. Others are more troublesome like the echo problem I’ve experienced on numerous calls. However, the biggest area of complaint by far seems to be Exchange Active Sync (EAS).  Corporate Email support is a must for many of us and Microsoft Exchange is the dominant platform. EAS in its current implementation just doesn’t work for many users because of its inability to support security policies. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything mentioned in the Verizon documents that is addressing this in the two scheduled updates.

Do you have problems with your Droid? Let us know what you like or dislike in the comments.