Upgrade Time!

I've now had a cell phone for 20 months, and am eligible for an upgrade through Verizon. It's tempting, because the Motorola Droid X (which was not my first choice, but was what I got after being sick of the unavailability of the Droid Incredible and the HTC Evo) is slow and getting slower. There are probably fixes to this, including rooting (which I've never attempted, although that was one of the things that attracted me to Android in the first place). The slowness would almost be worth demonstrating on video, but instead I'll use words. Touch the Wi-Fi toggle widget, as a for instance, and it will take five, ten seconds -- or longer! -- to even register the touch. Then the little impeller icon spins and spins for... thirty seconds? Longer? Before turning off the damned wi-fi. Touch a contact icon to make a phone call, and you get a similar wait. When I need to make a phone call quickly, this becomes maddening.

So be it. It's a damned space age minicomputer. But it's human nature to want something to work the way it's supposed to. A hammer with a wobbly head is also annoying. The worst thing about the Droid X, though, is that the headphone jack is so sensitive that it renders the FM radio (an app I use five days a week during my commute to and from work) nearly useless. If you so much as breathe on the jack when the FM radio is playing, the phone starts the music player. It happens over and over.

As of March 15 I'm eligible for an upgrade. The Galaxy Nexus is appealing, but I have the sneaking suspicion it's not really a Nexus. And it's got a mediocre camera. I don't want another Motorola. The HTC One series looks pretty sweet, but they're not out yet and no word on whether they're coming to Verizon.

Thankfully, the Android community came to my rescue in the form of Headset Blocker. This free app solves the most frustrating problem of my phone: the sensitive headphone jack. Turns out that the phone senses a disturbance to the jack as a signal from an in-line pause/play button (that some headphones, but not mine, have). This is a hardware issue, but the app fixes it by telling the phone to ignore any "signals" from the headphone line. Bammo! The phone is still annoyingly slow, but at least I no longer want to throw it into traffic three times a day.

So I will wait another six months or so and see what comes along. I want my next phone -- if I even renew the data contract and keep owning a smartphone -- to be a quantum leap forward in functionality.

We'll see.