Austen owns an original Motorola Droid. Well, technically, he owns his fourth Motorola Droid since he bought it on the day the phone was originally released. He’s had three replacements of defective phones, and Verizon has helpfully offered to upgrade his phone. If he pays for a new, upgraded phone. He is, understandably, not too thrilled with the idea of purchasing a new phone that might also cast him into smartphone replacement purgatory.

I purchased the original Motorola Droid on day one of it’s release. I’m a tech fan and was excited. It worked reasonably well (between OS glitches and all) for 8-9 months. I had antenna problems (3G not present where other Droids had it, dropped some calls too). I put up with it until about month 11 and got fed up, then got a refurbished replacement (#2). The replacement came, worked fine for awhile until more problems of a different nature arose. Then Verizon sent another phone (#3) which I could tell out of the box was not good (physically or functionally) so I returned that and kept #2. Still holding onto the second device, my problems inexplicably lessened (not because of OS updates, restarts) so I held off on getting another (#4 at that point).

Recently, I was having signal issues again. Not only does my 3G shutoff altogether, I can’t even change to WiFi with out at least one restart. On top of that, if I’m on a phone call and I receive any message (email, text, chat) there is a good chance that the call is ended. Other times I will be playing Pandora only for my phone to shutdown. Later I find out it’s a result of someone trying to call me.

I called Verizon last week again to complain. The lady was very good and helped me through a restart. She (to my recollection) informed me that because of my history (and being now jaded with the Droid) if the problem persisted, I should call back and get an upgrade.

Today I called and they offered to sell me a new device as an upgrade. I told them it was absurd to sell me something new when they couldn’t ensure their first sale was good. They then offered me a fourth refurbished phone. I asked for a new Droid (original) but was declined, probably because they are out of production. So to me it seems that A) Verizon’s refurbished devices are not reliable, and B) Verizon wants the consumer to buy their way out of a problem, instead of supporting them.

PREVIOUSLY:
Defective Droid Sends Reader To Verizon Smartphone Replacement Hell
Verizon Sells Me Phones That Don’t Work, Won’t Give Me One That Does

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