I was an early adopter of PDAs, and mine traveled the world with me. Though fairly primitive at the time, I had an mp3 player module, a phone module, and a screen the size of an iPhone–the entire phone, not just the iPhone’s screen. I used it to keep notes, read books, and play the occasional game. It even accepted SD cards.

Fast forward to not long ago. Having determined it was not practical to get an iPhone, I got the Verizon-friendly Motorola Droid phone. I have to say, it was nice. Real nice. Felt good in the hand, good screen, excellent size, the UI was generally attractive and easy to use.

However, there was one thing about it I could not get past, and that was that the applications available for it felt like I stepped back more than a decade and was using my old PDA. User interfaces were inconsistent, applications had no base-line consistency in operation, and for the most part, crashed. Ultimately, this is the major difference between the iPhone and any phone with the Droid OS. Everything on the iPhone has to be blessed by the high priests of Apple and personally vetted by Steve Jobs in a ritual similar to finding a new pope, white smoke and everything…okay, maybe not, but Apple still has some oversight on the apps for the iPhone. Everything on the Droid feels like it’s in beta.

In its defense, the Motorola phone allowed you to store data on it, though saving the data and getting to the data was a bit cumbersome. The Droid phone also has a flash for the camera, which is a nice feature. And it did have a nice weight.

I traveled with the phone for a week, and simply found it to be not worth hanging onto. Thankfully, switching back to my previous Verizon plan was easier than setting up the new phone in the first place.

Oh, wait, there was one more thing. The keyboard was completely worthless. A great feature to include, the keys were too small, too flat and unresponsive to have practical worth. Same with the little thumb-pad.

If you were kinda thinking that maybe Nigel Powers was onto something with regard to his hatred for the Dutch, here’s the clincher: We pay about 5x more than they do for wireless service. And you can lump the Swedes and Fins in with the Dutch while you’re at it.

This is from a story on Ars, and I have to imagine that Nokia has something to do with that, what with them being based out of Espoo, Finland and all. So my question is this? Why hasn’t Motorola “given back” in such a way as to make us pay 1/5th of what we’re currently paying for cellular service?

Maybe it’s because they’re not the wireless juggernaut they used to be. Or because our country has the worst cellular infrastructure with a zillion different, incompatible systems running. And sure, they have pretty much nothing to do with AT&T or my iPhone. But still…

All of that aside, I have a mind to march on over to Motorola’s world headquarters (which just happens to be about 6 blocks from here) and give them what for. Mssrs. Brown and Jha, this is your 10 minute warning: Get out the checkbooks. I want a refund!

Ars Technica