So, only a little more than two months after releasing the Drod RAZR (my review here), Motorola and Verizon released the Droid RAZR MAXX on Thursday.

The new version has a whopper of a battery they claim gives the longest talk time of any smartphone, addressing the main user complaint about the original RAZR. Now people who bought the RAZR are upset that the MAXX came out just after their return window expired. Plus, they lowered the price of the original RAZR from $299 to $199.

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What's worse is that the wifi hotspot problem in the original RAZR is apparently still not fixed on the MAXX. I really wanted a 4G phone but need that feature, so I returned the RAZR because it didn't work.

When they announced the MAXX, I thought that turned out to be lucky because now I could get an even better phone with longer battery life for the same price I paid for the RAZR. Apparently not, because the wifi hotspot still doesn't work. Yet Verizon and Motorola continue to list this as a feature in the official product literature/specs ("Mobile Hotspot with support for up to 8 Devices").

What's even worse is that Verizon (over) charges $30 per month for the mobile hotspot feature, so anyone who had that on their phone and transferred it to the RAZR or RAZR MAXX is basically getting ripped off. Shouldn't they not be advertising this feature, or at least disclose that it doesn't work? Shouldn't the FTC or the FCC or somebody send them a sternly worded letter about it or something?

(Some hacker geeks have rooted their phones and installed the stock Android wifi hotspot feature which apparently works, but according to Verizon's contract that's theft of service.)

My guess is that the fubar Bionic -> RAZR -> MAXX rollout was not planned to be this way, but software delays screwed up their timeline. And those software delays could likely have been avoided (and problems fixed more expeditiously) if they would just INSTALL STOCK OPEN SOURCE ANDROID and leave out all the other "enhancements" and bloatware and make them optional.

Another thing that bugs me is that the big time tech media "reviews" all mention wifi hotspot as a "feature" when they clearly didn't bother to actually try it. They should disclose which "features" they copy and paste from the vendor websites that they don't actually test. (I bet MotoCast is a POS, too.)

Anyway, I'm not one to usually get too worked up about some gizmo I really want but isn't available or doesn't work. In this case, though, I wasted a full day acquiring the original RAZR, switching accounts around, and testing the thing before having to return it and switch everything back.

As I said, I guess I was lucky because now they have an even better version. But I'll have to wait until it's fixed (sometime in February, according to Verizon, which is three months after release of the original RAZR) and I'm beginning to wonder if I should even be doing business with such sleazy companies.

I wouldn't even consider it except the RAZR and RAZR MAXX are the best smartphones on the market right now. I'm sure they will have an even better one in a few weeks, though, with quad core processor and 128GB SSD and an espresso maker. Right after I get a fixed RAZR MAXX.

OK, then.