Long story short, my bionic started rebooting a lot at random. The phone is bone stock, no root, I don't really run anything exotic on it. Nothing like what I had going on my trusty Eris, which NEVER failed me.

Yesterday it rebooted and then refused to go past the droid animation screen. I ended up having to do a factory wipe/restore to get it going again. Since I was wiping it I figured I would install the ICS leak (.232) I'm annoyed that I had to wipe it in the first place, no clue what started happening with the phone to cause it to reboot and finally choke completely out. I love the phone otherwise.

So, about ICS. I don't think I have ever been so underwhelmed before. It has a great, clean, fresh interface. It does run a little quicker than it did before. Battery life is about the same for me. Other than that... I don't get the hype. I understand that this is a leak, and not final. Citrix doesn't function properly at all anymore, which I use a ton for work. Flash support is still broken, which is something I never realized how badly I would miss. It seems like every video uses flash. Even the ones on CNN don't play, they freeze up whatever browser they are in. Most of all though I can't tap into the football streams with my phone now. That is almost a complete deal breaker for me. I bought this phone to have the full desktop browsing experience in a small package. I don't like mobile sites, and that is what ICS feeds me without flash. HTML5 is great, but I seriously doubt it is going to catch on as quickly as everyone thinks.

I think I am heading back to .905 this weekend unless my experience drastically changes. I just hope my phone doesn't freak out again, because I will have to find a new one if I end up wiping every few months again.

 

After using ICS for a few more days, the interface is growing on me. Citrix still refuses to work, and I am finding other things that I like/dislike here and there. Maybe there is a work around for some things that I am not aware of.

I don't like how they handle Widgets. Can they just be displayed in a list? Also it takes sometimes 30 minutes to an hour for installed widgets to show up in the menu? is that normal? (ie: I install a widget from the app store, it is fully installed, but doesn't show up on the widgets until significant time has passed)

I have tried almost every suggestion to get embedded flash to work, still no luck there. It won't work in any flash supported browser(dolphin, skyfire, firefox) I did however install chrome to check it out since I have to browse without flash anyways, impressive. It will definitely be replacing Opera Mini for when I want to pull up something quickly. I still want a browser for full webpages(w/flash) though.

On a side note, my bandwidth results via speedtest appear on the surface to be significantly lower than with .905 has anyone else noticed this?

 

Unfortunately with .232 dolphin crashes on me all the time. I'm sure it is a leak issue. That is normally my browser of choice for full websites. I don't miss my Eris, I just never had problems with it like with my bionic. It was rock solid no matter what I did with it. The bionic seems much more finicky.

If I didn't love my bionic so much I would give up on it. For an "older" phone compared to the latest and greatest it holds up well in my book. I'm just not sure I will stick with ICS when the OTA arrives. It is a shame the latest leaks are locked. I would love to try them out, but I can't risk losing .905 at this point in time.