An Open Letter to Motorola

Dear Motorola,

Your new phone — the Droid X — is a pretty sweet device. It’s fast and light. The camera, screen and body are all what we have come to expect from Moto. Your hardware engineering continues to impress.

The software, however, isn’t as thrilling. The Droid X is running some new variant of Blur, your super-crappy social media integration skin you keep tossing on low-end Android phones. I don’t have a problem with skinning cheap phones — mainly because I don’t plan on buying any of them. Ever. But why skin Android? HTC Sense is wildly popular, but all that extra cruft adds time to updates and takes away processor cycles from useful smartphone tasks.

Matt Buchanan nailed it in his review of the Droid X:

The software—a discordant melange of the not-so-fresh Android 2.1 and various bits of the Blur “social networking” interface from Motorola’s lower-end Android phones—is the shudder-inducing poster child for the horrors that can occur when most hardware companies try to make software. It’s ugly, scattershot, and confusing. It feels almost malicious.

The creeping feeling that Android is the new Windows becomes an overwhelming sensation the first time you boot up Droid X. Seven sprawling desktop screens, littered with widgets, oodles of little programs—the vast majority of which you probably don’t want or need.

Moto, make your UI devs print those two paragraphs out and tape them to their computer monitors, the rearview mirrors in their cars and on the light switchs in their kitchens at home. The whole “robots eating flesh” theme you have running on the Droid X is just plan bad. It’s a step in the wrong direction. A different wrong direction than old-school Blur took, sadly. Make the whole damn thing optional.

But I’m not talking about Blur today. I’m talking about the fact you locked down of the Droid X’s bootloader to keep customers from loading custom ROMs.

To make a bad situation worse, designing the phone to brick itself if the ROM, bootloader or kernel have been tampered with is downright despicable.

You’ve taken a page from Apple’s book here, but taken it to the extreme. You have out-Apple’d Apple.

I don’t think you understand what you have to lose here. Exhibit A is your very own Lori Fraleigh:

We understand there is a community of developers interested in going beyond Android application development and experimenting with Android system development and re-flashing phones. For these developers, we highly recommend obtaining either a Google ADP1 developer phone or a Nexus One, both of which are intended for these purposes. At this time, Motorola Android-based handsets are intended for use by consumers and Android application developers, and we have currently chosen not to go into the business of providing fully unlocked developer phones.

I’m not a developer, Lori. I’m just a guy who likes to take a peak under the hood sometimes.

However, there’s more:

Securing the software on our handsets, thereby preventing a non-Motorola ROM image from being loaded, has been our common practice for many years. This practice is driven by a number of different business factors. When we do deviate from our normal practice, such as we did with the DROID, there is a specific business reason for doing so. We understand this can result in some confusion, and apologize for any frustration.

So let me get this straight — your plan was to hook all of nerds with the Droid, then go back to the RAZR-era rules? The number of Android owners that swap ROMs is fairly low. Just like our iPhone-jailbreaking cousins, we’re just nerds who like playing with our toys. What’s wrong with that?

We’re the minority, Motorola. A noisy one, granted, but still a minority.

The original Droid is a great phone. Even though I write a blog focused on Apple, have almost half a dozen Apple certifications hanging on my wall and have a dogcow tattoo, I carry a Droid. Why? The hardware is great, but the ability to tinker with it is even better. Right now, I’m running a rooted version of 2.2, and my phone is fast, stable and gets better battery life than under stock 2.1. The nerd factor — coupled with Verizion’s great service — was enough for me to trade in my iPhone after carrying one for three years.

In short, Moto, before this, you were the hacker community’s hero. Your street cred with the nerds had never been higher. Why did you go screw that up so badly with this new phone? I understand that you can do whatever you want with your devices, but just know that there are a lot of Android lovers out there that aren’t to happy with you.

Be our hero again, Motorola. Free the Droid X.

Love,
Stephen