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Burned by Bionic. Should I trust Motorola now?

JRuppenthal

Newbie
Apr 21, 2010
10
1
Like the title says, I was very disappointed in how Motorola (or Verizon - hard to tell who was at fault) treated me a year ago when I purchased a Bionic. I had countless reception issues with that phone which were never really completely fixed. The lack of timely updates was frustrating, too. That said, the Droid Maxx HD looks like a fantastic phone and a worthy upgrade from my Nexus. Should I take the risk of giving Motorola a try again, or am I asking for trouble? I sold the Bionic in March and haven't been paying any attention to Motorola phones or the support they get since. Anyone have an opinion on this?
 
Honestly Motorola, i think, has the best radios in a phone, usually always have great reception, i have heard this in the reviews for the Razr Maxx.

Pushing out updates would probably be Verizon's fault, they are always so slow at doing that, it's awful.

I mean if you want to you can try out the Maxx and you have 2 weeks to decide, so if you don't like it, keep your old phone. If you have a Galaxy Nexus, i would suggest just to wait until some better phones come out :)
 
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Bionic has good reception, if yours didn't it's either your area to blame or your phone was defective and you should have got a replacement. Updates are always going to be slow on Verizon Motorola or not because of their testing processes before pushing an update out.

Your Bionic maybe, but there were plenty of early-adapters like myself who had continuous problems and weren't given the option of a replacement (or the replacement had issues, too). It sounds as though Motorola has worked through any QC issues they had with LTE implementation (or, again, maybe that was a Verizon issue - who knows), although I'm still a bit hesitant to pull the trigger until I hear a few more positive reviews. Thanks.
 
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Your Bionic maybe, but there were plenty of early-adapters like myself who had continuous problems and weren't given the option of a replacement (or the replacement had issues, too). It sounds as though Motorola has worked through any QC issues they had with LTE implementation (or, again, maybe that was a Verizon issue - who knows), although I'm still a bit hesitant to pull the trigger until I hear a few more positive reviews. Thanks.

im with you. 9 replacements later i was sitting with an iphone. but i cant wait to get back to a motorola.
 
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I can tell you this, I never liked Moto. just thought they were plain ugly. And never beleived the reception thing. Had my Maxx for three days now and it is going to be hard to switch after seeing how good the reception and batt lfe are!!!! It's 3:20 where i live and my phone is used for work. All day long phone calls (that would even drain an old flip phone). My S3 (which has great batt life) would be on the charger now. My Maxx is still at 75% and i just got off a 2 hour con call. I have three dead spots from work to home. Not once have they been dead spots with the maxx. I am now a Moto fanboy!!!!!!

P.S. I buy every new phone that comes out (latest and greatest). this by far is the best PHONE i have had recently. I am talking about the phone part. some of my others had better specs. But reception and batt life is unmatched by anything else i have had (Dinc, T-Bolt, Dinc2, Gnex, S3)
 
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I can tell you this, I never liked Moto. just thought they were plain ugly. And never beleived the reception thing. Had my Maxx for three days now and it is going to be hard to switch after seeing how good the reception and batt lfe are!!!! It's 3:20 where i live and my phone is used for work. All day long phone calls (that would even drain an old flip phone). My S3 (which has great batt life) would be on the charger now. My Maxx is still at 75% and i just got off a 2 hour con call. I have three dead spots from work to home. Not once have they been dead spots with the maxx. I am now a Moto fanboy!!!!!!

P.S. I buy every new phone that comes out (latest and greatest). this by far is the best PHONE i have had recently. I am talking about the phone part. some of my others had better specs. But reception and batt life is unmatched by anything else i have had (Dinc, T-Bolt, Dinc2, Gnex, S3)

That's good to hear, Wedgemoose. I'm a phone hoarder, too. Currently have an iPhone 4s on VZW and a Galaxy Nexus (unlocked) on T-Mobile just 'cause I can. Looking to replace the 4s with either the iPhone 5 or the MAXX, so I'm doing due diligence. The last Motorola I owned was the Bionic, but before that I had Moto's going back to StarTac days (if anyone remembers those). Always loved their build and call quality. I'm leaning toward the Moto at this point (not sure if I should get the Razr HD or the Maxx HD) just for something new. I can get another upgrade in January if I want to return to the iPhone...
 
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Loved the StarTac. That was probably the best phone ever made. I liked my HTC phones except the batt life was horendous. And Samsung just isn't good. I love my gnex but Samsung is bad in alot of ways. My worker had the bionic so i know exactly what your talking about. But i love this Maxx so far. it's only been three days though. But you can usually tell if a phone will be good in three days. So if your an old moto guy you will love the maxx.
 
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I just got my white Droid Razr HD and I'm Loving the build quality!! Reception & signal haven't dropped and stayed consistent at work and home so far. Can't tell you about battery life yet because I got it this morning but I will in a later post. The UI is my favorite out of the four major oems, it's clean, smooth, and nearly stock! In my opinion I think the nearly stock UI will lead into faster updates like the promised jelly bean by the end of the year because they don't have To tweak as many things on a custom UI. So if you like updates I think this has the best chance to get them the fastest outside of a nexus device.
 
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Get the razr Maxx HD.......it's a freaking monster. I raved before on the battery life of the razr maxx but now that I got the razr maxx HD it even BETTER. I worried that the larger screen would drain the battery faster than it did on the regular razr maxx but it looks like the processor is much more efficient so that even the larger screen doesn't overwhelm the difference in screen sizes from both phones.
Also, the build quality is better than that of the regular Maxx. I'm looking at both phones right now and the edges on the RMHD are sharper and more refined than those on the RM. There's this brushed aluminum edge around the RMHD and it's also a little weightier yet still light. Makes you feel you have a quality device in your hand.
Another improvement is the keyboard in portrait mode. I have thin fingers so it's never been a problem for me to type. I was making mistakes left and right on the Razr Maxx. It was just too small. My typing was much better on my previous Galaxy Nexus (NEVER AGAIN, Samsung!) so it was difficult to get around. Now on the RMHD I have zero problems with typing now. The keys are larger and have more space in between them. My mistakes went from 1 out of 10 to about 1 out of 50 words and that's because I'm not paying attention.
Reception issues are null. The only issue I have with this phone is not knowing how to kill the battery. Hardly an issue but I had to come up with something. There's no way iphone could ever compare to this phone especially on battery life. There's just no way.
 
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You mention a Nexus....the Galaxy Nexus on Verizon? Talk about crummy reception....I had one of those and it ended up getting replaced with the Razr Maxx, which has been great.

Did you keep Gnex until 4.0.4 or JB 4.1.1 update? It was rather awful with early ICS bugs, reception issues during launch days. But I think 4.0.4 addressed about 70~80% of that and made it a lot more usable phone. Now with JB, it feels like entirely new phone with great performance boost and got much better in almost every way (battery, speed, camera, call/data connection quality, etc). Google did fantastic job with stock JB, at least for Gnex.

I was very close to switching to GS3 in summer but decided to give Gnex one more chance with JB update and so far it exceeds my expectations. GS3 has great hardware overall but I am not fan of physical home button and it feels too wide for my hand. I like that Razr/Maxx HD screen seems very close to Gnex in look and feel but noticed some lags on home screen. I'm sure these phones will get a lot better with JB update soon, but I don't see them as significant upgrade from Gnex other than battery life. I decided to keep my Gnex into 2013 and look at new phones in next summer for upgrade.
 
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I just got a maxx HD (had a razr maxx) today, and here's my little experiance.

Razr MAXX had a weak 4G signal in my house. Im in a fringe area, but the signal would hold at about 1 or 2 bars (-106 to -118 dbm). GPS would be slow to lock also.

Got the HD charged, swapped SIM cards, and did a quick set up. I switched it from Global to LTE/CDMA and noticed the signal was at 1X. "Here we go" I thought. Anyway, I switched it back to Global, and left it. I then saw a 3G signal, and about 3-4 bars. About what I would have when my phone would switch to 3G. I finished the set up of my contacts, and installed all my apps, then noticed a 2-3 bars of 4G. Hmmm.......Ok. This was outside on my patio. I set the phone inside, and left it for about 10 mins or so, then picked it up to check the signal. Still 2-3 bars of 4G, -108 dbm. Put it in a different spot in my house, where the other MAXX would drop 4G, or have 1 bar (never checked dbms). Checked it about 10 mins later, and noticed 2-3 bars of 4G still! SO....All seems well as far as the signal holding goes. GPS acuires much faster than the razr maxx did. Call quality seems a little bit better, and volume is pretty dam good.
 
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I've had many cell phones and never had one with better radio (phone) reception than a moto. I got the RHD for batt life and phone/signal coverage. The rest of it is just gravy for me anyway. As I predicted, the RHD does not disappoint! I would quicker blame an issue on the carrier than the hardware, from my experience...except for the old school razr that flew off of the top of my car. Not a good flier but even worse lander! BTW, my wife's iphone4s reception sucks, drops calls frequently. That's the diff b/t an app phone that makes calls and a cell phone with apps.
 
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