Before Google finished their acquisition of Motorola Mobility, we haven’t been huge fans of good ‘ol Motorola. With their lack of timely upgrades to new versions of Android, and their lack of allowing bootloaders to be unlocked. But now that Google does own Motorola, it looks like we starting to see a whole new Motorola. Starting with their announcement a few weeks ago of the new Razr lineup – including the Droid Razr M, Droid Razr HD and Droid Razr MAXX HD – we saw that Google’s Eric Schmidt opened up their event by announcing that 1.3 million Android devices are activated each day. We were also told that owners of devices sold in 2011 that could not be upgraded to Jelly Bean would be getting a $100 credit towards a new device.
Back to the Droid Bionic, it must really suck to have this device. It’s almost like the unwanted step-child of Motorola. The Bionic was due to recieve Ice Cream Sandwich – Android 4.0 in the third quarter of this year, but that won’t be happening. As we only have a few days left of the third quarter, and Motorola also updated their update schedule earlier today showed that the Bionic along with a few other devices got pushed back to the fourth quarter.
Now Punit Soni has only been the VP of Product at Motorola for a few weeks, but he is on Google+ getting feedback from customers. Soni does admit that Bionic owners did get a raw deal, and that he is putting together a new plan for the device and its’ ICS upgrade (which is pretty late).
We have a plan for Bionic. I am currently solidifying things to ensure we can publish it, commit and follow up. I think you guys have gotten a raw deal and we could do way better. But you are one of the top few things I worry about when I look at Upgrades.
The Google+ thread (which is linked in the source below) goes on for quite a while and surprisingly it’s full of Soni’s responses to customers. He also stated that his team now knows to “take your complaints seriously” and in the future Motorola will be standing beside their upgrade timelines. So it looks like there won’t be as many delays as we’ve seen with the Bionic and other devices.
Again..I totally understand how you feel. And this should never happen. I am not going to throw out the argument “we just got here”. We are taking responsibility for this. And we will engage with you, listen carefully to your concerns and most importantly, try to FIX things.
So we are doing that. My team knows to take your complaints seriously, we are working hard to update the Upgrades timeline pages to reflect the right data, and then we WILL stand next to those timings and will meet them. As far as what is in our control, we will be transparent and we will commit to your happiness.
Keep the feedback coming.
Looks like the new Motorola is going to become a more customer-oriented manufacturer, which is what we like to see. I suggest you take Punit up on his words above and keep providing feedback to him and the rest of his team. And if Motorola can become one of the top Android manufacturers and compete with Samsung again, they’ll need to listen to existing customers, and keep them from going to other manufacturers and use them to bring back some of the faithful like myself.
Are you a Bionic owner? Do you feel you got a “raw deal”? I did own the Droid Bionic for a little bit, and it had so many problems including LTE dropping out often and no ICS upgrade in sight. Let us know your thoughts on the “new” Motorola in the comments below.
Source: Google+