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 can’t tell you how much it pains me to admit this (given how much fun I have razzing big cell phone operators), but Verizon was right when it constrained the design of the now-venerable Blackberry 8830, the so-called World Edition. the reason I have to confess is that I’ve upgraded to the next one in line, the Blackberry Tour. This is such a compromised device that it proves Verizon’s original premise that wireless is hard enough to do that you have to be careful in adding features to new devices.

I made fun of the 8830 because it didn’t work in the very first country in the world that I took it to (Peru). Along with that, it didn’t have a camera; it didn’t have WiFi; it had a GPS chip that Verizon had disabled. But I’ll tell you this: It did exactly what it was supposed to do reliably and quickly.

My Blackberry Tour, on the other hand, is a total disappointment. The keyboard is smaller than the 8830 so my big fingers constantly hit two keys at once, which never happened before. Worse, the trackball is a new design — rubber instead of plastic, and it has never worked correctly. It appears to have particularly difficulty going left to right (which is really important when you try to correct mistakes made by big fat fingers). The battery life is noticeably shorter than the 8830, so now my phone runs out of juice around 4pm instead of around 8pm on a heavy-usage day. The Tour freezes regularly, either for 10-20 seconds while its processors try to sort out or in a way that requires restarting the device (which doesn’t have a physical on-off button).

The worst thing of all! Sitting right here in my office, where the 8830 worked perfectly, the Tour keeps dropping calls. I’m pretty sure that Verizon’s signal is just as strong and that they haven’t changed towers or antennas, so that means I have an upgraded device that has downgraded radio and isn’t able to maintain calls as well as the earlier device.

So I have an upgraded, much-cooler smartphone that doesn’t work very well. The processor, radio, and battery are all worse than it’s predecessor. I wonder what happened to Verizon along the way that it decided that it was wrong and it should just throw features into the Tour.

Unlike most people, I have two phones, and my other phone is an Apple iPhone 3Gs. I upgraded both phones in the same week four weeks ago. I now find I can type faster on the iPhone, with its improved keyboard software; the iPhone hasn’t crashed or frozen since I bought it; and it has a better browser, better music player, better camera, and much, much better applications platform and environment. Every time the Blackberry asks me for permission yet again to download, install or activate an application or approve its access persmissions, I keep thinking that maybe I should just say no. Installing more stuff on this Blackberry might make it slower or less reliable.

Of course, what happened along the way was the iPhone, which presented a significant competitive threat to Verizon, one that benefited AT&T and changed Verizon’s attitude toward device design. Maybe I should start thinking about porting my primary phone number to the iPhone and abandon the Blackberry entirely. If only AT&T had a network with the performance and reliability of Verizon….

When I spent a week in Buenos Aires recently, I left my Blackberry behind and just used my iPhone for a week. My conclusion: I don’t like my iPhone 3G and was happy (or should I say, less unhappy) to get back to the U.S. and my Blackberry.

I am not here to sing the praises of the Blackberry; the reason I had to leave it behind is that Verizon said it wouldn’t work in Argentina. This is a model of the Blackberry labeled “World Edition” (otherwise known as 8830). It didn’t work in Peru either, when I went there about 18 months ago. And it didn’t work right away in England when I went there in March this year; it did work after about 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon support. Seems like false (or aspirational) advertising to call something a “World Edition” that doesn’t actually work in the rest of the world.

I come not to damn the Blackberry 8830; instead, my experience with the iPhone confirmed all the issues I had with it as a U.S. smart phone and added the experience that it must have been designed to frustrate anyone actually traveling outside the U.S. with it.

In the U.S., my iPhone basically doesn’t work as promised. The browser, the email program and most of the downloaded apps will pretty reliably crash within a few minutes of use. The email program will crash and the email I was working on will disappear. (And then I have to use the glass keyboard, which just doesn’t cut it for fat fingers, which I have, to retype the message.) I thought this kind of unreliability is what Apple was trying to avoid by delaying the release of the developer tools and apps store.

And then there’s the iTunes Apps Store (or whatever the heck Apple is calling it these days). Apple started out with the brilliant concept of a place to buy music for your iPod called the iTunes Music Store, but they have twisted and bent it out of any recognizable shape in order to sell videos and now iPhone applications in the same place. When I download a “free” app from the iTunes store, it has to go through some kind of unintelligible dance about whether it really is free or not. And then Apple sends me an invoice for $0.00. If I wasn’t a fairly experienced user, I’d be completely befuddled by Apple’s download process. And then some of the apps developers update their apps every couple of weeks, which causes a whole different set of problems — my iPhone tells me I have application updates, then tells me I can’t download them because they are being modified, and then when I can download them, puts me through the same stupid purchase process for free updates and sends me yet another invoices for $0.00! Conclusion: Apple didn’t take the time to redesign the store and now the iTunes stores is a total UI mess and probably an e-commerce mess as well.

Outside the U.S., my iPhone decided that I am a bad user and constantly told me I was doing the wrong thing. We called AT&T to make sure that the iPhone would work in Argentina and they turned international useage on before I left. AT&T sent me an email warning me that if I actually used the iPhone the way it is deigned to be used, I would have a huge bill. When I arrived in Argentina, the iPhone itself told me turn off “Data Roaming” to avoid outrageous charges. Turning off data roaming requires four clicks on the phone: Settings/General/Network/Data Roaming (and means you can’t browse the web or get email). As soon as you turn Data Roaming off, the phone starts telling you (repeatedly, every time you try to do something involving data) that data roaming is turned off so you can’t get any data (even if all you’re doing is reading email that was already downloaded). To turn data roaming back on is another four clicks, and instantly you are warned that you will incur unusual charges. I felt like the iPhone was constantly scolding me — for doing what it was telling me to do! Conclusion: Apple really didn’t think anybody would use the phone while traveling (at least to Argentina) and didn’t bother to include that in the PRD for iPhone 3G, even though it is the second version of the phone and clearly designed primarily for data roaming!

Four days into the trip I got an SMS message AND an email message from AT&T warning me that I had incurred unusually high roaming charges and that I should call AT&T (toll free!) to discuss how to minimize these charges. Remember that we had already called AT&T before I left the country and set the plan for international roaming. Remember that I had been trying to minimize data roaming. Our office manager called AT&T and they changed me to a different plan that was half as expensive and backdated to it the day before I left the country. That reduced my charges from $400 to $200 for the first four days. I can’t wait to see the final bill, now that I’m back. Conclusion: AT&T is a complete mess as a company and cannot get its pricing straightened out for normal people traveling around the world.

Bottom line: I don’t like my iPhone even more than I don’t like my Blackberry World Edition 8830. One of these days, the combination of hardware companies, wireless operators and software and service companies will actually design a fully useable device and service. Won’t life be grand then?