Ice Cream Kid

Ice Cream Kid © Stanley Mouse

I have this love, hate thing with Google. Love the free blogging platform, love the let's not be too evil philosophy, love the voice recognition technology on Android, love many of their products, their original populist streak. But there are many things I can't stand.

Google, and more to the point Larry Page in his new cost cutting quest for the bottom line and efficiency, doesn't seem to have a lot of regard and loyalty to the consumer and end user. He builds great innovative programs, some that I actually pay for like Picnik and then kills them without batting an eye, leaving the user frantically waving our arms in space as we come crashing to the ground. I visited this page and counted 68 programs either expunged or slated for demolition.

There is no such thing as customer service in Google land, the practitioner urged to visit a chat room and hopefully find another person who is possibly less misinformed than he is.

I bring this all up because I would like to talk about my phone. My Motorola Bionic. I know I bitch and moan a lot about Verizon and some of this might be their fault. But here goes: After my LG Lucid died its miserable and premature death, some Verizon troubleshooter in Nebraska said that he wanted to make me happy and while he couldn't hook me up with an iphone, I was going to get the great phone he uses, the Motorola Bionic. Just to tie this together neatly, Google bought Motorola Mobility, the company that produces the phone, last August.

I just had one question for the guy. Was the phone upgradeable? No problem, man. This phone currently uses the Gingerbread 2.3.4 operating system but soon you will be rocking to the sultry strains of Ice Cream Sandwich! Yippee, I says. How long until the upgrade? A month, tops. I was down with that. I didn't quite understand all these sugary confectioner's terms but the phone sure sounds sweet.

Well, it has been a year this month since the Bionic was released and I still get no ice cream. Lesser phones with lesser pedigrees are giddily motoring around on Ice Cream and now its successor, Jellybean and still no ice cream for me.

It had been supposedly slated for the early third quarter and I am no math whiz but I figure third quarter is July, August and September so that window is now officially closed. Maybe they really meant early late third quarter?

Internet spies now say that it really means November. There are a zillion sights that live and die on this geek stuff like its the crown jewels or Kruschev's shoe we are talking about. I merely wanted a phone without these continual "no data connectivity" messages and one that wouldn't be obsolete soon after I forked over the three hundred dollars. I didn't have a clue as to the significance of the bootloader being ultimately unlocked or not.

Honestly, I wonder if the fact that Google decided to recently fire 4000 workers at Motorola Mobility has anything to do with the delays? The old, sorry, we fired everybody that was working on your device and it sucks to be you.

I went to the Verizon store to try to score an extended battery for this little juice hog yesterday and the guy said that this phone's hardware is incompatible with ICS 4.0 and they should have never even tried to attempt the rewrite. I don't know, this technical stuff is way out of my pay grade. Perhaps Google is more interested in going back to selling Nexus devices?

One thing I do know is that it is getting harder to trust these people with their seeming lack of regard to the consumer. Will be hard to buy another phone from them. Say what you want about Apple but you never have to put up with this crap.