Doesn't work: phone

I got my first cell phone, a verizon free phone, in 2003 and hated it.  I replaced that in 2005 for a sidekick 2, which I loved.  Sucky web browser, but great everything else.  I wasn't expecting good web browsing then, so I was very satisfied.  It finally died in 4 years; not bad.  I replaced it with a used sidekick id, as I needed a replacement right away.  That didn't go so well, mostly because t-mobile does not have good coverage at my new office in Ohio. 

So, last summer, I upgraded to a motorola droid.  I love a lot of things about this phone, but it's clearly malfunctioning.  When returning to the home screen (launcher) it suddenly decided to clear all my icons.  I went back through my apps and created a new "desktop" full of icons.  A few weeks later, it brought back my old icons so there were two layers.  My launcher was an illegible mess, especially when I tried to move icons around.  I fought through to remove the old icons that had reappeared.  Later, the icons disappeared again.  At this point, a friend recommended the Launcher Pro app.  This has solved the problem, except that it often hangs when loading the icons and shortcuts.  That's pretty annoying.

I've also had random shutdowns, which I assume is a related problem.

I brought the phone into the store once, but the kid only told me I should shut the phone off, so he just did, without asking me.  This closed all the windows in my browser, though he told me after it shouldn't have.  He then said my problems should be solved.  They weren't.

Other symptoms have included very slow-loading apps (such as maps), a stingy market (it would tell me it was downloading apps and updates, but never install them) and GPS that works fine except when I started driving navigation.  Some of these are still issues, but I don't always use all these things.

I still love having this phone (I'm writing this post on it; hooray Blogger app!), but I'd really like it to last for 3 more years and not frustrate me at random times.  Let's hope Google fixes this on the software side!