Sure, it looks great, takes very good pictures, and has an amazing display.. but my Tour is becoming increasingly unstable and laggy. Both of these situations have a simple fix – reboot – which sadly takes 7+ minutes on the device. Yeah – SEVEN minutes – sometimes creeping up to TEN. Its absolutely unbelievable, considering how “powerful” it is supposed to be – lots of memory and a fast processor – yet it can’t load its own OS nearly as fast as Blackberries with much lesser stats? Huh? My old Pearl (see the earliest posts) could out-boot the Tour by 5 minutes, easily.

Stability wise, its great, as long as I don’t use any 3rd party apps. The latest version of Facebook has a nice bug that literally reboots the device when I exit the app. What? I guess we’ll call that “memory cleaning” or something. Ridic. Running Google Maps works quite well.. as long as you have alot of time. My lovely Tour has a little hourglass problem.. where nearly everytime I try to USE Gmaps, it loads quickly, then hangs for a solid 30 seconds. The phone is completely unusable during this period. And it likely will repeat this behavior several times during the Gmaps session.

Signal quality is abysmal. I am still dropping out of 1XEV constantly, down to 1X, and sometimes losing signal altogether. Its not Verizon’s issue, as I’ve mentioned before – its this goddamn phone. Kim’s old Curve is still a champ at holding a signal. Fortunately this signal crap does not drop too many calls.. but it still does now and then – though not as many as the good old iPhone.

It’s been said, since this phone came out, that the new “OS5.0″ would be coming out “soon”. 5 months later, its still not out, thanks to Verizon.. however there are some leaks out there. I hope I hope I hope the new OS will fix the issues I list above.. namely the booting and signal quality issues. I suspect any “fresh install” of an OS will fix some of the instabilities .. much like any device. I am not banking on the new OS to come out anytime soon, however – nor do I really expect it to actually fix the issues. I am almost certain, in fact – especially since the Tour2 is coming out (with features like Wifi, trackpad and a truthfully faster processor). If the Tour(1) were so great – would there be any need to build a better version of it immediately after release? Nope.

So.. as I sort of suspected some time ago.. the Tour is simply my “right now” phone. Thinking about day-to-day frustration, it is still less (but not much less!) infuriating than my iPhone experience- probably because the camera is relatively awesome, and it still does a great job at email.

Now that Motorola released the Droid, and  Google has its Nexus One out (soon to be on Verizon).. I’m starting to get more interested in Android – but I am going to wait it out a bit longer.