I have owned three HTC Android phones from the Eris to the Incredible to the Thunderbolt. The Eris was a great phone that suffered from too slow of a processor and in comparison to today's phones, too small of a screen. I loved the trackball though and the way it glowed when you had a notification. Then I got the Incredible. It was zippy enough in the processor department and well made with a screen that looked like glass candy. However, the battery life was stupid bad. Next the Thunderbolt came out. It was a great phone. Battery life was better, not great but good, and the processor was fast enough to handle Android and the apps. I started having some issues with the phone later on. It would randomly reboot, which is a known problem. The other problem I had was with the phone "losing" the SD card. Sometimes the icons for the apps on the SD card would all go to placeholder status and be replaced with generic Android icons. I would mess with shutting the phone off and turning it on, pulling the battery and other things and at some point the phone would force close UI and restart and everything would be back to normal. That could be an errant app or something. I never figured it out.
I tried the Droid X while I had the Incredible and sent it packing after two days. The lack of cut and paste was the final straw on top of the poor UI. Now I have the Droid Bionic and I am thinking of returning it and getting a replacement Thunderbolt and then getting the Vigor when it comes out. My issues aren't with the Bionic itself but with the way Motorola implemented Android yet again. HTC's Touchsense UI is so far superior that it makes the Bionic and other Motorola versions of Android look clunky and poorly constructed. Touchsense is intuitive, smooth and most of all easy to use. Let's start with the phone dialer. On an HTC Android phone you hit Phone and the dialer comes up showing the last number dialed and from there you can hit dial to recall that number or scroll through your call history. Tap an entry and have the phone dial them. It's just too easy.
On the Bionic you hit the dialer icon and get four tabs. If you are on the "Dialer" tab you have the most recent call. If you hit the call button it highlights the number and shows it in the call field. Then you have to hit call again to make the call. If you want to see your call history you have to go to the "Recent" tab. From there you can tap an entry and then another icon menu pops up and you have to tap the dialer icon to call the number or you can tap Contacts, Text or E-mail. If I wanted to do any of those things I would have fired up the appropriate app not the dialer. This is just too many steps to make a call and you can't preset the dialer to automatically dial numbers with one tap. It just seems poorly executed and inept. Another perk to HTC Android's is that they easily connect to your Facebook account and link your contacts accordingly as well as place a pic on the contacts from their Facebook profile.
Okay, aside from this you are limited to five screens on Motorola Android rather than seven on an HTC. Granted on the Bionic you do have a little more room to stuff icons on the screens as they are smaller and take up less real estate. Then there's the all apps icon on the "dock." It takes you to all of your apps. If you are loading up your screens you have to do so one app at a time and you have to scroll through all of your apps each time to get back to where you were because it doesn't just stay there where you were selecting. No, it goes back to the beginning each and every time. The other thing that I find bothersome is notifications. On an HTC phone you can set notification sounds for e-mail or texts separately, which makes it easy to tell whether you just got a text or an e-mail. With Motorola they are one and the same with no options. A final nuisance is that you cannot have one G-mail icon for more than one account. On an HTC phone you can have a G-mail icon and there is a button inside to switch from one account to another. No such luck with Motorola with them you have to use a separate icon and it's not even a G-mail icon.
On the plus side the Bionic has better battery life and being a dual-core it is much faster with apps. It also opens up my gallery of photos amazingly fast. If the Vigor has comparable battery life it's a no brainer. It will already be a faster dual core phone and come with Touchsense UI 3.5, which looks amazingly good.
