[Atrix 4G General] CSharpHeaven:
After an unnecessary long wait for Gingerbread release in the UK I have finally upgraded my Atrix to Gingerbread last night, 24/11/2011. My handset is actually T-Mobile's but flashed the retail UK ROM instead using RSDLite tool (used it for the first time) and released myself from the mercy of T-Mobile as they are always last in line for updates in the UK. I was proven right by TRose's post on Motorola's Owner Forums today. Having sim unlocked my phone previously, for a fiver, the transformation to a retail handset is now complete.

I would like to share my experience with Motorola leading to the Gingerbread update. If you have previously owned Motorola handsets, as I have, then you would be familiar with most of the things I have to say.

Obviously I could have done better with my time than typing this post with one figure on my Atrix phone. I believe having a voice regarding matters that affect large communities is very important. One would imagine in 21st century the human rights are observed and respected. I don't think that is the case and in the past ten years I have observed how corporates have been behaving like tyrants. I'm grateful I can submit this post freely about my concerns with Motorola.

Motorola without a doubt is the most arrogant, snob, and out of touch company in the world in my opinion, at least within the same business Motorola operates. This is the company that have measurable procedures in place to maintain their attitude towards matters outside of the company. One has to remember Motorola is a USA based company and they have been around since 1928. A company that established itself in the country where many men and women fought for freedom for the rest to allow anyone to succeed in the land of opportunities, the USA. I couldn't give a better example to which Mr Sanjay Jha an Indian born gentleman has been given the opportunity to lead one of the best known American companies. Was this possible even 30 years ago, I must ask?

What deeply disturbs me about Motorola is the self given rights to have no regards for the customers. Ever since I bought my Motorola Defy, Jan 2011, I have been browsing the Motorola's Forums and I found this pattern where the moderators keep bragging about Motorola's Business Partners and the "Precious Partnerships" but have nothing to say about the customers as if those who actually pay money to Motorola are non-existent. Does Motorola have any customer related slogans these days?

Let me be clear about my thoughts about Motorola before trying to find, speculate, or assume why things have been going the way they have. There is nothing on this planet, as far as I'm concerned, justifies Motorola's behaviour towards its customers, this is totally inexcusable in any context. Motorola can't have people's money then hide herself behind the terms and conditions and expect us not to have any voice over the issues. Only tyrants reserve the rights to themselves, are you one Motorola?

In my opinion the root of the problem is at the very top where you can find a gentleman called Mr Sanjay Jha. Assuming back stabbing wasn't the method of Mr. Jha to get to vice president and president positions in various companies one has to admire what he has managed to achieve. Allow me to remind the younger readers of this post that how important it is to realise the magnitude of Mr. Jha's achievement to be the CEO of Motorola today. Any company in the world only require 'one' CEO but many employees, directors, and so on. The world's population has reached to 7bn already. Today, only Mr. Jha hold that position at Motorola and no one else's.

Most of us would agree that Motorola still got the magic when it comes to hardware design. Of course, not everything Motorola makes is outstanding but for a company to create something like Atrix then it becomes apparent the company has the means to produce quality products in a very competitive market. I often praised the hardware engineers at Motorola but maybe that is because the software engineering division is so awful with no especial talents to be found there.

You might find this very strange if you knew Mr. Jha has a solid career in software engineering but then again what mainly people complain about are software related issues in Motorola phones i.e. performance, annoying issues that make the user experience very poor, very slow to denial of software updates, no commitment to any timelines, and many more.

In the past few weeks the Non-US Atrix Forum has been a battle ground for the UK users, naturally because of the English language. My threads were removed, my posts were censored occasionally after days of submission, my account was disabled five times, and at least I know one of my disabled accounts was used by Motorola. Please see the attachment and the explanation below. My goal was to give a medicine of their own and exercise my rights as a consumer whom felt Motorola clearly being abusive to Non-US consumers. I cannot speak behalf others in here but would like to acknowledge I was aware of the tactics being adopted to continue the battle with Motorola. I am humbled by the supports I got from other members and the participations to defend their own consumers' rights.

I'm really curious to find out why Motorola has been doing this and what makes them the right to treat their consumers the way they have done since a long time now. Mr. Jha was appointed in 2008 and the first Android phone from Motorola was released in October 2009, Motorola DROID (Known as Milestone in Europe). With the UK (Glasgow & Liverpool) history of Mr. Jha I wouldn't be surprised if he inherited some of the bad practices some of British retail groups have/had. In such business strategy a company provides next to zero customer service, puts the salesmen on high commissions, and make a huge fortune by selling insurance and extended warranties at distortion prices at same time. The outcome? Most of the salesmen had disappeared, people often don't pay for extended warranties and the companies in questions established themselves in a market where there won't be any rivals. Since then the customer service of these companies have been improved but not fixed. These companies somehow expect pad on the shoulder for this now, cheeky buggers. Motorola is not a retail company but I can see customers are not the focal point of the current business strategy when it clearly should be. Allow me to do an analogy if I may.

Apple and Motorola both are arrogance towards their customers but for very different reasons. Apple tells the customers you have no say in what we want you to have but should you choose us we will give you the best customer service experience. Why is that? Because Apple first respect themselves before respecting the consumers of their products. Motorola on the other hand, has no self-respect, don't believe in their own products and very disrespectful to their customers. That is the reason Apple is where they are and where the Motorola is today. Apple kept their consumers well informed and provided timelines in iPhone 4s battery saga so far but Motorola have been playing psychological war games with its consumers all the way. Please remember, Motorola has never broken any promises before because the promise itself was the game strategy to manage their plan to release the updates when they wish. Motorola has no short of talents in this department. The department is called the PR Machine.

I once phoned a UK Motorola number to find out where I could send my Atrix's faulty battery to for a replacement before someone grabbed the phone off the lady I was talking to and told me not to call again and hanged up on me. To me that was the true face of Motorola where their staff have no regards for the company's consumers.

I believe it was around mid October that Motorola officially announced, via the Forum Manager, due to the bugs mid-November was likely the release date. At that time I promised to keep my eyes on things to verify the claim that Motorola was hard at work fixing things. I even said they couldn't give us a ROM with a built date earlier than the announcement's date. Well, have a guess? In fact they did, the UK retail Atrix Gingerbread has 22 September build date. Motorola virtually has had the UK Retail ROM for two months while they decided to lock the main thread with unjust excuses and carried on censoring and not allowing users to share knowledge. Motorola couldn't even be consistent with the censorship implementation. Please bear in mind that all the tests that they claim do are done before the last build date.

The remaining of this post is not a personal attack on the Motorola's Forum staff but my chance to have my say when they censored me and disabled my accounts on regular basis to prevent me to have my say.

Mark, the forum manager, you are not as nice as you claim to be. Your number one fan is "you". I often read your posts how you bragged about your niceness. I have seen enough in my life, being in the age I am, be able to read between lines. You know very well that you have concealed information from the forum members and lied about how much you knew whilst claiming you are on our side. I appreciate the fact you have a job to do but I cannot knowingly lie or conceal information from others like the way you do. You must have the qualities to be able to do the job you've been doing for sometime now. To me any persons with those qualities could not be nice and someone I could trust and this is a common sense as far as I'm concerned.

Also would like to remind Motorola that in spite of your measurable and misrable procedures in place to control consumers and how you badly treated the UK users I have noticed the level of financial damage UK users managed to impose on you individually. Maybe that has contributed to the decision that Atrix 2 is not coming to the UK but I think it is understood that you cannot mess with us.

After the main discussion thread was locked by Mark then Matt opens a new thread "Are UK Atrix owners satisfied customers Yes or No? Please give reasons.". To this date only 27 replies can be counted for and few of them are off the topic. In a way I'm glad people didn't provide valuable information to Motorola because they don't deserve it. I have minimised the chance that Motorola would steal my usage patterns for their financial gain by blocking their master cloud server's ip address listed under the System Information and also frozen the update related programs that would upload the collected data to the Motorola's servers.

Mr. Jha! for the sakes of all Indians I hope you never find a place in the political systems of India. This is evident that you have no regards to civility.

The moral of this post is to remind the readers you do have rights beyond the wordings on Motorola's Terms and Conditions and as consumers we can be vocal on public domains such as XDA. The demand for Gingerbread was justified as all UK users purchased their handsets with the promise of it by Motorola's precious business partners. You won't even get a Thank You from me after what you put me through Motorola. Next ICS campaign.

I can't expect much of the USA tech news sites but UK tech sites have been awfully quiet about Gingerbread saga other than Techradar's Kate Solomon, having bigger balls than the male reporters, to make a reference about the forum thread being closed by Motorola. Thank you Kate.

"This will probably still irk the reams of users waiting to hear about the long-promised Gingerbread update for the UK - it's been out in the US for months now, and Motorola has taken the step of shutting down the forum thread on the subject." Kate Solomon (Techradar)

The following words became defiant words against Motorola during the last weeks.

Alcohol, Custom ROM, Samsung, Apple, HTC, LG, RIM, ZTE, and Nokia

Known as Atrix Lee on Motorola Atrix (Non-US) Forum.