The Not-so-Good:
* TouchWiz: I know that many of you despise Motorola’s Blur, but I’m hear to tell you that nothing is as bad as Samsung’s TouchWiz. It’s an iOS ripoff that makes even decent hardware chug along at a pace not seen since 2007. It’s buggy, appears to be designed by a children’s book company, and can’t be masked by LauncherPro fast enough. If there was a ever a reason to start the “We want stock only!” petition, this would be it.
* Old hardware: If this was worthy of the “DROID” tag, it should have had something other than the same guts as the Samsung Fascinate which came out in 2010. Sure, they added a front facing camera and an 8MP shooter on the back, but the rest of it is all the same including that god awful RFS file system. Where is the dual-core? The massive amounts of RAM?
* Plastic casing: The device is made of plastic and isn’t going to last you 2 years. I’ve had it for about a month now and already managed to scuff the edges from simply pulling it in and out of my pocket. I haven’t seen this happen on any other device in the life of this blog. At least when HTC makes a phone out of plastic, it almost feels like metal and not like something your 2-year old will crush in less than a minute.
* Android 2.2: As I’ve said with every Verizon device over the last couple of months, it’s almost sickening to see them launching with Android 2.2. Gingerbread has been out for almost 6 months now, yet we’re releasing phones with one that came out a year ago? Just wait and see how happy new Charge owners are going to be when the entire DROID lineup from Motorola has GB by the end of June and it’s still sitting at 2.2.
* Verizon Bloatware: The amount of bloatware that Verizon tossed onto this thing is intense. I’m not sure I can even count that high to tell you the truth. While we’re no longer surprised that they will continue to fill up Android devices with this crap, we’ll still point it out so that Big Red doesn’t forget how much we hate it.
* Look: This is a personal thing, but I’m not a fan of the Alienware-esque exterior of this phone. The hump on the back doesn’t allow the phone to lay flat on a desk, the pointy shield speaker/camera housing/chin all remind me of something from Star Treak, and those massive physical buttons just seem well, silly.
* “DROID” tag: You get the feeling that since the original Bionic was delayed, that Verizon panicked because they no longer had a 4G LTE “DROID” and decided to slap the tag on this phone. Sure, the marketing campaign is super slick, but this device should never have donned this elite tag.
* Slow wake time: It may sound like I’m nitpicking here, but when you press the unlock button on your phone, it shouldn’t take 3 seconds for it to come on. Such is the case with the Charge and I still can’t figure out why.
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