Android Incredible May Be More Crappy Than Incredible

Acquired a new Android Incredible phone this week as I wanted to escape the icy, DRMed grip of Apple's iPhone/iTunes. Unfortunately, it appears the honeymoon may be very short.

Today, the phone spontaneously rebooted three times--each time returning the error message "SD card removed." But I had not been messing with the SD card. I'd just pressed the icon for mail. The third time it rebooted, it appeared to be locked up. It seemed to be stuck at the "loading" stage. I started Googling around for solutions and before I could find out how to do a hard reset, it came back to life.

Sad to say, there are already posts on the Android forums about this issue. One in particular caught my eye. goatspanka (!) reports:

I live on the border between Mississippi and Alabama and I get random reboots when at home, but when I am at work, I don't get issues at all. I have the 8gb card from my storm in it, so I don't think that's a problem.

I do live in a "fringe" coverage area so my phone is constantly looking for service. The tower switching problem sounds valid, but I have heard of reboot while using wifi only, so it may be a software problem. It seems all we can do is wait.

To which another Alabamian, kur1j, responded:

Damn didn't want to see this...

I am in Alabama and have had the phone reboot 3 times today. I am in area where I don't get great coverage.

I didn't notice it before the OTA update. 1 day after the update and its done it 3 times. And this was posted today.

Guess I'll just have to keep an eye on this. If the Droid Incredible becomes the Droid Crappy, I might trade it in for a regular Droid. I was intrigued by its sliding keyboard anyway...

Update 5/9/10: Verizon doesn't exactly make it easy for you to find the user guide for the Droid Incredible. I finally tracked it down here after much Googling:

http://cache.vzw.com/multimedia/mim/htc_incredible/incredible.pdf

But that URL doesn't look very permanent. You can get there by following links from

http://support.vzw.com/

Update 6/10/10: A month later... and I'm happy to say that the rebooting issue resolved itself within a week or so. Since then I've only experienced the "incredible" side of the Droid Incredible.

That is to say, I'm lovin' it!

The iPhone did play a bit of catch-up this week with version 4, which contains some of the features of the DI -- like multitasking. But still I have no buyer's remorse. It feels good to be free of Apple and AT&T Wireless.