When the Rezound went on sale for $80 I figured that it was time to make the leap from my Samsung Omni II w/ Windows Mobile 6.5. In a perfect world, my Omnia wouldn't have been hanging, the Incredible 4G wouldn't have been delayed and VZW wouldn't have been killing the unlimited data plans on 6/28. This is my first Android phone after many generations of Windows Mobile devices. For me the phone is predominately a phone and email device so here's why I am frustrated with it:
I have set up email accounts on the phone for both my corporate email (Microsoft Exchange) and my personal Hotmail account. Did the normal things for both like setting them to Push during peak hours and checking every hour from 11:30pm to 6:00am and also turned on email notification for both. These were similar concepts to how you set up email accounts in Windows Mobile.
Here's where the problem comes in - with my Omnia, when a new email arrived in my email account, it would get pushed to the phone and the notification chime would sound. I am not getting any new mail notifications on the Rezound because the new emails are not showing up in the phone unless I open the standard email app that came with the phone and select the mailbox. When I open a mailbox, it gets refreshed and the email gets pulled down. Unless I can get this phone to automatically receive email and alert me when it arrives, it is absolutely worthless as a business tool.
2nd email problem that is frustrating me is that emails that are deleted while I'm working on my laptop don't get deleted from the phone. I get a lot of email daily and there is no way that I am going to go through the inboxes on the phone and manually delete the emails that are already deleted. Windows Mobile handled this perfectly - I need Android to do the same.
I want to give Android a chance but so far, I am underwhelmed.
I'm not set up on an exchange server, so I can only speculate...did you turn on not just email notifications, but the sound and/or vibrate settings?
As far as items being deleted from your phone, do you have Outlook or whatever you're using on your laptop to delete email from the server when you delete them in your email client? If they aren't deleted off the server, your phone won't know they're supposed to be.
It's been a few years since I've dealt with exchange and I've never dealt with the combination of it and Android, so like I said, all I can do is guess...
I made some progress on my issues yesterday. I went searching in the Android Central forums and ran across a couple of threads that helped. While I had the email accounts set up as they should be, there are a couple of settings in the Accounts & Sync that needed to be turned on that apparently are not by default. Once I turned on Background Data and Auto-sync, I started getting the emails pushed to the phone and the chime for new email. On the Exchange email account, a delete of an email is now sync'd between the phone and laptop. The lack of deletes syncing is still an issue on the Hotmail account so I'm going to have to do more research on that one.
Sure would have been nice if the folks at the Verizon store had known enough about their product to have been able to help me with the problem rather than just telling me that it was a limitation of Android and I would have to get used to it.
Yeah, you would expect that, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, Verizon chose to do away with the contract technicians they had in the stores (no one new they were contract, they looked like VZW employees) who were actually trained on those kinds of details. 10 years ago, you would've had someone in the store who could do it all, but then VZW wanted them to "pay for themselves" by making accessory sales and getting people to upgrade, then turned them from techs into just another customer service rep dealing with billing stuff, while still call them "techs" and finally just dumped them altogether. They used to have people in the call centers who could walk you through this stuff too, but they seem to have gone away as well.
The company has done away with all of the real "customer service" and refocused everyone on sales. If I'm angry with your company, why would I buy something new from you? Yet they (and many other companies) try.
Congratulations on your recent upgrade to the Rezound, rstarr.
I am confident you will love your Android once you use it more and become more familiar with the functions. http://bit.ly/oc2kd5
We do offer a Wireless Workshop that helps smartphone users out tremendously if you are interested.
Tamara H.
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