There have got to be easier ways to do this!

Looking Up Contacts – Another criticism is the lookup.  Why on Earth can I not force it to look up someone?  I usually get so frustrated with finding an old message to reply to and waiting for it to pop up a correctly-spelled name, that I close the messaging program (I use Handcent) and go to the Contacts and send a message from there.  For the longest time I did not think there was even a method for sending a text from the contact because it only refers to calls, but there is a little face icon that you can click on that eventually will open up and you an send a text from there, with the messaging program you specify (the default of Handcent).  Granted, I have almost 8,000 contacts synched, but the names I type in are unique enough.  This should not be so onerous!

Deleting Messages/Housekeeping – My biggest problem with the messaging on the Droid after not being able to find my contacts, is that I have to hit FOUR BUTTONS to confirm the deletion of a single text!  What on Earth is this all about?  I already get my texts backed up on Gmail and my SD card, so why do I need to hit that may buttons for a single message? It’s absurd and complete waste of time.  If they are so worried about me inadvertently deleting an un-backed up message, why don’t they just create a trash folder?

Finding Old Messages – I found a little trick to quickly find someone I want to reply to, but it doesn’t seem to work as well as I would like.  When you are in your messaging inbox, you can do a search, but it is NOT intelligent enough to see the name or number of the person you are searching for.  It only searches the content of the messages!  I am going to do some research and hope they fix this flaw soon, as it renders the search feature much less powerful.

Browsing to Top and Bottom of Messages – I also miss the Blackberry features like hitting T for top of your inbox and B for bottom.  There doesn’t appear to be any way to navigate except to scroll, and despite the small software upgrade, there is still a lot of stuttering for me when I go through my messages.

De-Threading Available? – There does not seem to be a way to de-thread messages, and when I’m backed up on my Facebook status updates from friends that I get delivered in that manner, this can really be a nightmare.  My old Motorola 9cq was actually helpful in some ways because every message was individual.  While this contributed to a lot of clutter, at least I could do house keeping a lot easier.

No Auto-More? – When I do have long threads, there is a subtle button nearthe top that I have missed seeing a few times and I have gone ahead and deleted messages that I did not have read.  I wish there was a way to have all of the threads remain live when I scroll so I can just finish reading it.  When I DO hit the view more messages button, it takes me to the top of the thread, so that I forget where I ended.  This doesn’t make any sense to me.  If I am reading a long thread backwards, then I want to be able to just continue to scroll from where I was.

Gmail only limits you to 10,000 contacts.  I have used Outlook for many years and I have many more contacts than that.  Granted, they are not all active and not all even have email addresses, but it is a pain to have to move people back and forth to keep the ones that are active in my main address book that synchs.  It would be nice if I could just use filters and have them all in one place in Outlook, but to synch with the Google cloud I cannot do that.

What makes matters worse is that I do not use Exchange for my personal domains, nor do I feel like I want to pay for that extra service, although it is available through various third parties for a monthly fee.

So I had to purchase a program called CompanionLink which for a flat fee does the synching at intervals that I need.  Supposedly they are working on a version that doesn’t require the Google cloud, so that would probably circumvent the problem I had with the contact limitation mentioned above.

I don’t have a problem per se with with Google cloud, but I do have an issue with how long it seems to take to pull up an name, particularly with the text messaging.

I use a free Droid application called Handcent, which is much more heavy in features than the resident texting program.