The Motorola Droid is truly terrible, in part because it has such promise (and has been amazingly well reviewed — I worry I’m missing something). Ironically, most of the blame for the cruddiness of the phone really should be laid at Google’s feet, not Motorola’s.

The hardware (which is Motorola’s) mostly works. The keyboard is horrible and I’ve never used it, which means that it is a real design flaw given how much weight and mechanical operation it adds to the device. (The software keyboard works well enough that I’ve found it adequate but the other problems with the software make it barely useable.) The camera button on my Droid doesn’t work and never has, so I call up the camera from the home screen. The on-off button is poorly placed for one-handed operation and requires real force to actuate. But this is just version 1.0 issues that Motorola will likely fix next time out.

The software (Google’s Android plus apps both from Google and from other developers) doesn’t work and is unacceptable on a mobile device. First, the operating system doesn’t work well enough to be considered a mobile OS. A mobile phone needs to have an OS that is really tied down and ready to perform at all times, like for receiving phone calls. This one isn’t. The process management in the OS stinks. Press on an app icon; maybe it will come up and maybe the phone will just not respond. Who’s to know why? Try pressing on the phone icon at 70 mph and have it not respond. Then try pressing again. And then get a message something like: “Activity Home (in process android.process.acore) is not responding.” Force Quit or Wait. Oops! I just drove into the guy in front of me when he slowed down and now I’m dead!

I’m not actually joking. The software is so bad that, for instance, when you open the phone app and click on search, there are multiple opportunities for the software to not respond or to respond incorrectly, which means that the phone is not useable unless you are starting intently at it and very, very patient about waiting for something to happen. If you want to search your contacts, you type the first letter and the phone will stop responding for 20-30 seconds. Don’t know why. If you keep typing ahead, you get no feedback about what you’re typing until the phone responds, and then you will likely have typed the wrong things so you have to start over again. It’s very, very unpleasant experience, particularly when you think that the search function must have been made by Google engineers, who have made billions of dollars with very fast, efficient, satisfying search on the web.

I have missed calls, lost calls, misdialed calls, pocket dialed people, and had many other experiences in the last month that have lead me to conclude that the Droid is not suited to its intended purpose as a smart phone.

I have been using my iPhone in parallel (but with a different phone number, of course) and I replaced my Blackberry Tour with the Droid. I can say definitively that the iPhone and Blackberry devices have never gotten in the way of making or receiving phone calls, but the Droid actually makes it harder to make phone calls than the other devices. The phone app crashes or suspends. The bluetooth fails to connect in my car. The camera often overtaxes the device and cannot process the images fast enough to actually capture what you have snapped in about a third of the photos. If you get the picture you want and then went to send it by email, the process of creating the email, finding the address of the person you want to send to, and actually sending the photo can take as much as 5 minutes, including the wait times the phone forces on you. In fact, the first photo I sent of my new grandson from the delivery room was only partially rendered. You can imagine how I feel about my Droid when it caused my very human desire to brag about my new grandson to fail.

I can go on and on, but after a month of using the phone (or trying really hard to use it) as my primary device, I have concluded that it’s a bad product and I have to get rid of it. It is plenty clear that Motorola was so desperate to get it on the market that it didn’t take time to test it properly and pushed or pulled Google into releasing crappy software on it.

I am open to suggestions for what device should replace my Motorola Droid, which has turned out to be a real piece of crud. I want a device on Verizon and already have an iPhone on AT&T. I’m not willing to wait for Motorola to fix the Droid or for Verizon to do a deal with Apple for a new iPhone. I have been thinking that maybe I should port my main phone number to my iPhone and just stop carrying two devices. What do you think I should do?

I’m a really loyal customer when companies do what I want — make products I love and treat me well if I buy a lot of them. I have a love-hate relationship with Eddie Bauer. And I suspect, not knowing anything in particular about Eddie Bauer Holdings Inc. (other than that its assets were sold at auction in August for $286M to Golden Gate Capital), that most of my hate comes from the fact that Eddie Bauer doesn’t know how to use technology on behalf of its customers.

I’ve been a loyal customer of Eddie Bauer for at least the last decade. I buy the company’s shirts religiously: The LT size fits my torso perfectly. Eddie Bauer Wrinkle Resistant shirts really do resist wrinkles over a long period and many washings. But they still pass as dress shirts (rather than stiff upgrades from the polyester of yore). So every shirt I currently use for work is an Eddie Bauer. (I even experimented and bought a shirt from Old Navy, but it doesn’t fit right, it gets wrinkled even though it’s not supposed to, and it doesn’t feel like real cloth.) I’ve also more recently started buying Eddie Bauer’s pants too, since they fit and have the same wrinkle-resistant and fabric qualities. (TMI, I know, but I still get my shorts and socks from Nordstrom, which does know how to use technology but doesn’t make my kind of shirts and pants!)

I just went to eddiebauer.com, logged into my account and clicked on my order history: Two orders are recorded, one each from September and October of this year. What kind of order history is that? I’ve got at least 20 shirts hanging in my closet, about half of which I ordered from the web site. (Maybe customer records were not part of the bankruptcy sale to Golden Gate Capital?)

Okay, whatever: Now I want to buy two pairs of pants like the one that I’m wearing way too much because it’s the only pair I have that’s exactly what I want. I look at the labels in the pants. Size. Care. Brand. But no indication of what the model or SKU of the pant is. I go to eddiebauer.com and look at the men’s pants. There are Wrinkle Resistant pants called Dress Performance Kahkis and other pants called Casual Performance Chinos. Do I already own a Kahki or a Chino? I don’t know! The pant doesn’t tell me. The web site doesn’t tell me. So I order blind (which was the October order — I wrong wrong and returned the order, none the wiser).

Okay, I’ll go to the goddamn store, of which there are two in San Francisco, two more in the suburbs, and three outlet stores in those outlet malls in the distant burbs. The fun begins. I don’t have a product name to use with the store staff. (Yeah, I should have brought the pants with me.) I do have something called an Eddie Bauer Friends card, but the irony is that the store staff can’t look up my account to see what I’ve bought either! If I do find a shirt or pant that I like but isn’t in the right size, they can’t look up inventory in another store or online and have it shipped to me.

I could be behind on this, since I haven’t tried actually asking for help in an Eddie Bauer store in the last few months, so maybe they’ve fixed these problems. But I’m a regular visitor to the store at the San Francisco Center store as well as an occasional visitor to the outlet stores in San Rafael, Fairfield and Santa Fe, NM. I even pop into Eddie Bauer stores in malls in other cities, when I see one. The reason I bother going to the stores: I’ve discovered that, in the stores (but not online), I can find unique shirts with great patterns that are sometimes in my size. You have to look at the shelves underneath the main dress-shirt display, but I’ve found this works in every store I’ve stopped into around the country, whether in a mall or in an outlet.

In fact, I’ve turned this into a kind of game: Whack The Shirt. I’ve gotten a few really sweet shirts out of the game. (I just love the black one with slight white pinstripes.) But I’m getting tired of playing the game. Why, I wonder, can’t Eddie Bauer’s inventory system keep track of every shirt they put into it. My favorite wine store, K&L Wines, keeps track of every bottle of wine they have, including which store (four in all) and warehouse (three) each bottle is in and how many are left. They can guarantee delivery of what they are selling.

Eddie Bauer’s systems are so bad that they can’t tell you what you’ve bought, they can’t help you buy more, and they find new ways to frustrate loyal customers! The word about the bankruptcy was that the company couldn’t work out of its heavy debt load. I’d be willing to lay odds that they ended up taking that debt in the first place because their IT department couldn’t build flexible systems that delivered products to customers efficiently and happily! (But whatever you do, Eddie, please don’t go out of business and make me go buy shirts from someone else.)

I got pissed off at my most recent Blackberry. When I heard that Motorola was introducing a hot new device based on Google’s Android and that it was designed for the Verizon network, I decided to dump the Blackberry Tour in favor of the new Motorola Droid.

All the press I’m reading compares the Droid to the iPhone. Wrong comparison, for a lot of reasons. I’m inclined to think that the Droid is the first phone to give RIMM a heartache for its Blackberry phones, but perhaps I’m just being persnickety.

First, the Droid: It works. Mossberg’s review and Pogue’s review do a great job of covering the details of the device, both good and bad. The bottom line is that it’s an amazing device. It’s kind of dorky, but Motorola will deal with that over time and the fact is that it’s a really differentiated position from the super-smooth iPhone. Droid is the first device, IMHO, to really deliver on the idea of Android as a smartphone operating system. With both Motorola and Google behind it, it has a good chance of being commercially successful.

Second, if it is, the question is really what is the Droid going to hurt? Not Apple. People who like the iPhone like the iPhone because it so amazingly well designed, stylish and cool. And it has all those cool apps. Apple is a company that has spent more than 30 years learning how to encourage application development, something that Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T will never figure out and that Motorola will figure out in another 30 years.

The Droid has Google figuring it out and Google is a little more nimble that than those old companies. So I’ve got the idea that Droid is going to sink the Blackberry. Motorola knows how to sell to enterprises. The Droid uses ActiveSync to support MS Exchange, and it seems to work as well as Blackberry Enterprise Server (or better, since it’s free and supported by Microsoft). The Droid has a much better approach to the application business (called Android Market on the Droid) than Blackberry. (My Blackberry, rest its soul asked me to confirm at least three times that I really did want that application and that I really did trust that application, before I could actually install and use it.)

Android Market is open and managed by Google. Whether to charge and how much is up to the app developer. The platform is well supported and easy to make software for. And it’s got its own dorky kind of coolness. So there’s a reasonable chance that Droid (and Android, by implication) will become the second stop for app developers after iPhone, and maybe the first stop for enterprise apps and for location apps that require a multitasking operating system.

Meanwhile, the Droid has anomalies. Its task management is funky, it does produce weird error messages, and sometimes it seems too busy to respond to the user. You need two hands to get the thing to wake up. Blah blah. But I don’t have a Blackberry for the first time in nearly 14 years.