I should first let you know that I have an HTC Droid Incredible -- a very nice, critically well reviewed, competitive, and expensive cell phone. It was a birthday present this past summer, as I was overdue for a two-year upgrade. It pretty much does everything you could imagine. You can do a Google search by taking a picture of something, you can go on YouTube and Facebook and anywhere else on the internet at what Verizon touts as "blazingly" fast speeds, you can play all kinds of games, you can e-mail, use it as a flashlight, keep a calendar, get automatic weather updates, get turn-by-turn driving directions via Google Maps, and so much more with all of the applications you can find on the App Market. If you were to ask me, I would say it definitely competes with the iPhone, which needs little introduction.
So, with so many amazing features in what one might call a technological marvel, it would be safe to suggest that it performs rudimentary tasks with efficiency and ease. And for the most part, it does. Call quality is excellent, text messages are sent and received quickly, and reception is hardly ever a problem. But, it seems that capabilities arguably even less strenuous than those are quite problematic for my "Incredible" phone (come on, you saw this pun coming sooner or later). You see, my phone has adapted this habit of changing my settings and erasing things under its own will, as if it gets bored when I'm not using it. It has changed my settings for e-mail notification, internet connectivity, and automatic updates, specifically not updating the current weather automatically, a setting I definitely had enabled. It also keeps me logged onto Facebook, and tells people that I am online and that they can send chat messages to me. This is not a problem, but somehow it decides that Facebook just isn't important enough, and then doesn't notify me of the message, leaving it unintentionally ignored.
Of course these things aren't so bad, they are merely extraneous issues, and I can deal with them. But the involuntary erasing of information is extremely frustrating. Around Christmas time it deleted every single last one of my text messages dating back to when I received the phone. With a large memory capacity, that's a lot of text messages. I didn't discover this until I received a text and opened the messaging screen, only to find that unopened text all by it self, completely alone in an abyss of white LED screen glow, once filled with months worth of improper grammar usage and misspelling. I got over this though, because nothing truly profound was lost.
But the final straw came two days ago, when overnight my phone deleted all of my contacts. Every phone number I had saved to my phone was gone. Vanished, as if into thin air. Needless to say, I was in a fit of fiery rage. I'd say that having your contacts is up there as one of the most vitally important functions of the cell phone in the modern day. You would imagine that a phone of this caliber could expend the energy to maintain those contacts on the phone's memory. Well, after some attempts at reacquiring them with the people at Verizon, my mom let into the woman on the phone at customer service, and two minutes later, they decided to send me a replacement. Astonishingly, It came to us in the mail in only two days, and today I took it to be activated. Unfortunately, they could not recover my contacts. But hopefully this new phone is not a lemon... Or a brilliant technological breakthrough, depending on how you look at it.
Oh, and P.S.
Verizon could not find my contacts... but I could. They we're hiding in my online backup. Well, not exactly... I had to look in the ever so convenient "Trash" section, where all of my phone numbers were waiting for me, to be recovered and swiftly synced back to my phone... I still don't know how they got there.
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