Rogers disappoints HTC users in Canada with mandatory software update

The HTC Dream was the first hardware sold with Google's Android platform, a free/open-source operating system for mobile devices.

At the end of last year, when the Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers started selling these phones, I was extremely excited to get my hands on one.  Leading up to that I had gone through 2 versions of top-end Nokia phones running on Symbian (an N80 then N95 8gb) and was keen to get a touch-screen device yet not keen on the iPhone's proprietary software and inability to legally be 'unlocked' (being someone who travels and doesn't like paying large roaming charges to monopolistic carriers like Rogers.) So, when I found an HTC Dream on craigslist around Halloween I dropped the chap a line immediately and have thoroughly enjoyed using Android since.

I must say, though I like the HTC hardware, and Android itself, I've been very unhappy with how Rogers, the carrier I use, has approached their marketing and customer service for these phones - to aide sales for HTC Magic, for example, they disabled the software keyboard on Dream models so that customers would more simply see the two phones as competiting products based on falisy - the Magic doesn't have a hardware keyboard.

In addition to cheeky advertising gimmicks, Rogers has been tardy to announce a software update for their HTC Android phones - this has sparked huge community backlash (check out this forum thread) given that version 1.5, which my phone runs, was released in April 2009 and has since been updated by Google thrice (to 1.6 in September , 2.0 in December and then 2.1 this January!)  Adding insult to injury, the version of 1.5 they have been selling phones with apparently had a flaw which disabled 911 emergency dialling access!!!

Last week I got a couple of text messages from Rogers telling me that I had to disable my GPS location service on the phone to help them troubleshoot a 911 access problem.  When I got another message from them a few days back I ignored it thinking it was the same reminder, until yesterday - when I noticed that I had no data service on my phone?!  Looking back at that txt from Rogers last night I realised that they now needed me to run a software update on my device to enable 911 and that it was 'mandatory' - without making the update within 24hrs of this notice, my data would be cut off?!!?  After booting up an old PC of mine to run the update software today (they don't support Mac), losing all my data from the phone's main memory in the process (luckily Google is the store-house for my contacts and email though I still have to reinstall all my apps), I noticed that my data service is still not working!?

I looked all over Rogers' website today, then rang them and only after being on hold for some time waiting to speak to a human tech support agent did I discover, by way of a pre-recorded on-hold message, that it could take up to 24hrs to restore data *after* installing the OS update! This wasn't in their warning txt and they never sent me an email or phonecall (an automated one would've sufficed), let alone posted this message in an accessible place on their website.  Also noteworthy is that nowhere in this fiasco did they address why this update still kept us using Android 1.5 or when a 'real' (ie. not emergency) update would be rolled out.

And so now I wait, checking to see if those little bars for service get annotated with an 'Edge' or '3g' icon...

Here's what people are tweeting about this: