Bad Droid, Bad Droid, Good Verizon

Had my first REALLY negative experience with my droid yesterday... Something that is almost unforgiveable with a PDA but not uncommon with electronic devices.

It just stopped working.

At the office I had put the phone into sleep mode while I was in my cubical but when I tried to power up the phone it just would not startup. My first though was dooooooooh I let the battery run out but that was not it as it would not start even after being plugged into the charger. One thing I should mention here is the charger indicator light did come on when I plugged the droid into the charger but that was all that happened. Soooooo on my way home it was a side trip to the Verizon store with me thinking everything I had done in the last week would need to be done again and I would need to reenter all of my contacts…

Once at the store clerk #2 referred to seeing the problem before and suggested to the clerk #1 the battery be removed and reset back into the phone. Clerk #1 gave this a try but…. Nothing. The two clerks and my Droid then disappeared into the employees only section of the store leaving me to ponder the meaning of life and how much easier it must have been in the olds days with the pony express being the fastest form of communication. A few minutes later the two clerks reappeared and gave me the news… My phone was “DOA”…. It was officially the first “DOA” Droid that store had seen, causing me to first puff out my chest and then wonder what I was going to do now. Well Verizon came thru and replaced the phone. They took the SD card out of DOA phone, placed it into a new out of the box phone, and then enabled the phone for me and I was off.

THIS IS A MAJOR PLUS FOR VERIZON!!! They will gain far more in positive advertisement from me talking about this no hassle customer service experience than the cost of that phone they gave me. Had the racked me over the coals about all the things I might have done to the phone and given me a hard time about replacing the defective item I would have ripped them apart in this blog as well as talking about this experience to all of my friend… Instead they get this nice comment and nice comments when I convey this story to all my friends. Oh and I do like to talk so many people will hear this.


So what did I lose? Mostly just phone setup stuff that was easy and not very time consuming to replace… wireless router settings (although it did still have the names of the routers just not the feature turned on), Email connection settings, home page settings, and browser favorites. It automagically knew that I was missing apps that I had previously downloaded and reminded me to download them again, all my pictures and videos were still on the SD card, and most importantly because it syncs my contacts with iGoogle it was able to resync all of my contacts back to the phone (This was nice as my wife broke a phone in the past and she had to reenter all of her contact information manually).