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 was so thrilled when I heard that Snow Leopard (AKA Mac OS X 10.6) would support direct integration with Microsoft Exchange! I even went so far as to force our company (and all seven email users) to suffer a migration from MS Exchange 2003 (which doesn’t work with Snow Leopard) to MS Exchange 2007 (I won’t comment about how thrilled I am to upgrade to software that’s already more than two years old). I am the email administrator and am the decider in these matters!

But now my new setup has been working for about a month and reality is setting in. And that reality is that Apple’s Macintosh equivalents of MS Entourage on the Macintosh and MS Outlook on Windows has its own symptoms of old age and bad design! Now the email rage that was focused on Microsoft is pointed right at Apple!

For instance, you can cannot paste into the location field of an appointment iCal on the Macintosh. That’s right: No cut and paste in that particular field! So if you set up a new appointment and you want to have the location handy on your Blackberry or iPhone, you have to type it in separately, which means you have to remember it or write it down on a piece of paper if you don’t have a screen big enough to see both windows at once.

For instance, Macintosh allows you to add an email address as a new record in Address Book, but you can’t specify which “group” that record will be added to (which controls how the record will be synchronized to other databases). So to make sure that the record is synched to Blackberry, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and other databases. you have to remember to go to Address Book and copy the record into the right group!

I can keep for instancing, but the point is that the level of dysfunction with the Apple software promises to meet and potentially exceed the dysfunction of the Microsoft software! And we’re talking about Apple, the company that can do no wrong…

Recently, I have two experiences that have damaged my ability to do business. The first time, Apple Mail failed to send a file with two attachments that totaled about 18MB. With the help of our email hosting service, Intermedia, we tracked it to a known and discussed issue with Apple Mail’s inability to reliably and quickly deliver emails with attachments larger than about 4MB. That instance might have cost us a relationship with a new investor, because it appeared to them that we couldn’t respond in a timely manner. The second time, Apple Mail sent an email that was truncated because the attachments were placed inline in the text of the message rather than appended at the end of the text. That truncated email got sent to our limited partners and caused tremendous confusion about what we were communicating; made us look foolish with our investors.

I am completely committed to Apple’s platforms since I switched to Macintosh (in 2006) and adopted iPhone in addition to Blackberry (2008). I’m even more committed now that I bought the Snow Leopard story about Exchange integration. But I’m wondering whether Apple really does know software as well as it knows hardware and whether it can fix the issues in its software faster than Microsoft.

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….