As promised, and in hopes that this may help someone still having trouble activating their Droid Bionic (and I certainly hope not, this is really ridiculous...)
I went 24 hours with my new Bionic failing to activate. A maddening day, no doubt. And my geekbuddies at the Verizon store had been told by the Tech support people on the phone to just wait, a lot of Bionics were trying to activate, and mine will activate eventually.
Fortunately, that didn't satisfy the guys at my Verizon store, they figured out that by inserting the Bionic's SIM card into a working demo HTC Thunderbolt, the SIM card be activated, then reinserted into my Bionic, where the activation process would complete (and it took only a few minutes for t his entire process to take place. They were thinking (and I haven't talked to them since the morning of the 9th, so I don't know how this has been remedied or at least documented by the Powers That Be at Verizon Tech Support) that since we are in a 3G-only area, the phone was looking for a 4G signal to activate and wasn't able to fall back, or down, to a 3G signal in order to complete the activation. As I was leaving the store, they were gathering up the demo Thunderbolts they had on hand in order to activate the rest of the Bionics they had sold on the 8th (of which NONE of them had activated). I was at the door the morning of the 9th with my un-activated Bionic on the morning of the 9th, and as they were going through the T-Bolt process, some other Bionic owners were coming in.
Boy, I'll bet that Moto loves that their new Bionic had to have help from an HTC phone in order to activate in some areas. And that's all I'm going to say on the matter. There will be many other people too happy to beat up on Verizon and Moto over this, and I'll let them indulge themselves in my place. But many kudos go out to the guys as my Verizon store (in Flowood, MS as well as the Jackson, MS north store) for thinking this through and solving a lot of people's activation.
It would be really easy to just return the phone after all of this, but I'm likng the phone a lot. I'll write some more about it when I have a little more time with it. So far, really quick....I like the screen just fine, better than I did the X2. Battery life has yet to be determined, I don't expect to see anything better than the X and X2 I had (which was going from 6am to around 5pm before needing a "hit" to get through the night). Screen actions and transitions are very smooth. It feels very snappy. Getting used to the screen touch buttons, kinda miss the hard buttons on the X and X2. I haven't loaded up all of my apps quite yet, but so far, the few I've loaded up (including Handcent, Swiftkey X and XScope) are working fine.
That's all for now, moe later.
Geri O (sorry, that's all I could come up with right now....
)
Thanks for giving us a little red at the end..... what would a geri post be without it
Thanks for tellling your story. That will help out a lot of people hopefully. I do not live in a 4g area yet, but where I work is 4g, and the large city 20 minutes south is going to 4g on the 15th. I doubt that will extend all the way to my house though. The towers I hit are in the town to the north (only 1 minute from my house) and I will see 4g when they turn that town up by the end of next year (hopefully).
But the town where I work has 4g coverage, and the towns that I visit when I go back to my home state, the town that my wifes kid is going to law school all have 4g, so eventurally soon, I will have a 4g phone in my hands. I did notice that the Bionic doesn't have hard buttons which I have grown to like very well, and do not like the glass buttons on my wifes Droid 2 global, but that is something that I will have to live with.
I only use the notification light in the morning when I get up. My phone sits plugged in all night to my laptop, and I happen to look at the phone for the notification light when I pass by on the way to making coffee. So to have the Bionic notification light not noticable, well, that will mean a slight modification to my routine in the morning. But hey, routines are meant to be altered during this game we call life.
time will tell as we go along. I do suspect that a Bionic will be in my future, but I will need to compare the displays to see if it is close the X.
Geri i went an checked out the Bionic yesterday at the one of the V stores in wichita an they had 3 of them there two on regular display an one hooked to Laptop dock an thats what impressed me the most is the thought of i could the get a phone plus a that dock an basically eliminate my computer all together. I could use the as phone / mini computer take it were i want an when i get home stick in the dock an do the things i would normally do with my computer. that in self is what draws me to this phone No other Verizon phone can do this at this time. Know i no the other phones that verizon sells has the feature to were you use them as a modem for like a Laptop but no other phone that verizon has i know of has a dock like that. An there are many other cool features to this phone thats impressive from the way the Glass is curved on the edges. to the weight of the phone itself an it seemed slightly wider than the my X. An that boot Animation i want that animation. i wished some one like better your droid would get it. i don't care what the price would be i buy it in a minute an install it on my X. But i'll end on that an say i think that moto has a winner here an if some out there has one an don't like it. 
send it to me i gladly take it. 
O i have one other thing to add an i know this is the Bionic forum in all but that little D inc.of mine Geri too me i feel i have a new phone all over again.they did some good stuff to refresh the Inc again. an to that i'm one happy camper 
Later B33
Well, a little more about my Bionic story. (And thanx again, Wildman, you are the Man. Your efforts are always appreciated)
Today has been the best and most productive day with the Bionic. It hasn't dropped the 3G signal at all, and I've worn it out today, to boot. Perhaps the little town I was working in yesterday had a shakey tower nearby, who knows, but the 3G signal dropped 3 times, each time with a reboot, it came back. Re-registering with the tower, maybe? Haven't been able to use the phone in a 4G area, but I will be in one for a week in October. Can't wait...
As for the battery, I unplugged it at 5:30am and 13 hours later, and according to Circle Battery Widget, the battery is down to 30%. This is a little longer than the battery life of my Droid DX2. I haven't loaded up the whole battery (puns, anyone?) of apps and widgets that I had before, but with the way things have been running, I may go ahead a load it up. Gotta get my custom-made ringtones on there, too...
Haven't heard any buzzing through headphones (although I don't know what happens to music loaded into these phones, but every phone I've ever heard play music, even iPhones, sounds absolutely wretched. Nearly unlistenable. That's just me, I'm not casting judgement on anyone that does. That's why I have 3 iPods and load up only my CDs uploaded as WAV files). In spite of this little diatribe, the songs I heard through the headphone jack of the Bionic sounded like the rest of 'em, for better or worse.
Ditto wth the camera. Haven't tried the front one yet.
Texts come out fine, nothing weird.
I think I belittled the notification light earlier, but now I notice it regularly.
I guess you either love the screens or hate 'em. Well, maybe not, I like it fine...
With the DXs (2 DXs and 1 DX2) I owned, I didn't have near the problems that were commonly reported in their forums. Whether that turns out to be the case with this phone remains to be seen. Already, there are many posts appearing with various issues. And I haven't even touched on the activation thing I went through at first, discussed at the tp of this thread. I was in the Verizon store today getting a cover for my phone and they are STILL activating the Bionics' SIM cards with the phone of the aforementioned HTC TBolts. Not good, Moto, not good.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it (for the time being, anyway...)
Geri O "No red letters were harmed during the writing of this post"
