Is this the Droid you’re looking for?

Hello there! This is Fred’s wife, Caitlin, taking over his blog for the night. While he’s busy planning the next SMAZ event (and may I say, I’m really getting excited about SMAZ 2 – it’s promising to be another fun and exciting day!), I wanted to reach out to share a little technology problem we’re currently having.

Fred and I have had data phones for years. I had an early release of the Sidekick, way back when, and have gone through a dozen models of various phones since. There have always been advantages and disadvantages (pro: I can carry copies of things like a drug guide in my pocket; con: they don’t tend to be as reliable as a standard cell phone), but overall we rely on the data capabilities. Fred’s been coveting an iPhone – to the point of hacking his data phone into a wireless access point and then actually using his Touch to check email, twitter, etc. – but neither one of us was willing to give up the Verizon network. Have you heard AT&T is suing them for their current ads depicting the vast difference in availability of the 3G network? The latest round of commercials is cracking me up. All I can say is, we travel quite a bit, and Verizon’s network has been invaluable in lots of strange, out-of-the way places.

Then the best of both worlds became available. Last Friday we both traded in our HTC windows mobile based phones for shiny new Droids. Fred will be the first to tell you that I don’t like change – but I love this thing. I haven’t had a good mp3 player in ages (I ended up with the evil that is the Microsoft Zune when everyone else in the family got their iPod Touches) and I’m only now discovering the utter coolness of Pandora. I’ve also downloaded more games than I really need, as well as upgrading my drug guide and various other medical handbooks to the Droid platform. There are a few things I haven’t found fixes for yet – I miss my old one-touch speed dial – but overall we’re both very happy with our new toys. (Favourite app this week? Having finally ended up with a phone that has a high quality, 5 megapixel camera, I promptly installed an app that replicates the look of some very low tech cameras, including old-style Polaroids.)

I am, after all, a photographer. Which leads me directly to the problem: we can send text messages left and right, with no problems whatsoever. Sending picture messages, on the other hand, is a bit of a nightmare. I can send and receive pictures from my middle sister, who happens to have a cell phone in the same area code that I do. Fred and I can both send and receive to friends and family with normal phones. We cannot send pictures to other data phones at all. We spent, between us, a good three hours on the phone with Verizon’s technical support on Sunday, trying to trouble-shoot the problem. Fred keeps getting a message that I’m an ”invalid address” when he tries to send any pictures to me, and I have the same problem trying to send to any of the friends I tried to test this with. My pictures to him appeared to be sent, but were never received on his end.

Then mid-way through the troubleshooting, we got a clue from a complete stranger. Someone who has Fred’s phone number, but in my area code, has been getting those pictures. Ahh. For us, this pointed out a probable cause for the problem – someone had tried to build a shortcut into their code, and it’s now become a glitch. Fred gets an “invalid address” message because my phone number doesn’t exist in his area code… some poor stranger in Seattle gets my pictures because his phone number does exist in my area code.

Should be relatively easy to track down and fix, right? Nope. Forty-eight hours later, we called to check up on the support ticket that had been opened… only to be led through the same series of questions and tests we’d already been through. Nothing has changed - he still gets the same error message, and I can only assume the unknown person on the other end is now being confused by pictures of my cat. But then, the support person called back to let us know that apparently “lots of people” are having this problem with the new Droids.

Has anyone else picked up a shiny new Droid and discovered this problem? (Anyone checking right now because they hadn’t tested picture messagine before this?) Anyone out there who might be more capable of debugging the problem than Verizon seems to be? There are many things I think they excel at, but over the years I’ve been less than impressed with their code monkeys.

I can only hope someone finds the solution soon. In the meantime, those who have joined the Droid army – what’s your favourite app?

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Tagged as: droid, support, verizon