Droid X Gingerbread Review

I "upgraded" my Motorola Droid X recently to Gingerbread:

• Recording videos doesn't work. Instead my phone skillfully convinces me it's recording but then has no stop button, no way to leave the application, and stays in the video mode until I pull the battery.
• The phone now runs hot and the battery lasts about 1/3 the time as before. Might as well carry around an assortment of extra batteries just so I can use it throughout a regular business day.
  
• Swype now prefers really obscure words like "tutu" when I mean to type "you" and half the time fails to put a space in between words. The browser gets real confused when that happens and clears the input, not permitting me to manually add a space after I realize the mistake.
  
• Although the experience is now shinier with gradients and catchy animations, it is effectively immaterial when applications are hanging left and right and the actual interface for major components (like marketplace) have discarded basic features and transformed themselves from applications to advertisements.
  

Now here's some big questions:

• Why is task switching still unsolved? I need to download third party apps just to go in between two running processes. Really?
  
• Why is task killing still so difficult? To kill a task, Simply follow these 10 basic steps: (1) Go to the home screen, (2) Click the left button, (3) Press "Settings", (4) Scroll the menu down, (5) Press "Applications", (6) Press "Manage applications", (7) Press the "All" tab, (8) Scroll through the application list, (9) Press the menu item of the application you want to stop, (10) Press "Force stop".
  What the hell is that? 10 steps to exit a program? I'd hope that making this easier would be somewhat a priority.
  

Useful things that shouldn't have been removed

• Was moving an icon from the application list to the home screen so unbelievably hard and counterintuitive that you had to axe it and replace it with a 3 step process (which doesn't work if you have a task switcher btw)
• What is the white gradient near the bottom of the screen? My guess is that 1 out of every 10,000 users had some phone background that was just a montage of android icons and then they went in to their carrier, complaining that they couldn't find the buttons on the interface. It really harkens back to the old days when there was a d-pad with an "ok" button in the center wherein the default functions for the d-pad were operations that incurred a charge, like calling your voicemail or depositing money directly into your carriers bank account.
  
• The interface is now branded everywhere with my mobile carrier. Are they so insecure that I need to be reminded every screen in the largest letters on the screen, who I pay every month? My carrier has already opted to plaster their logo on both sides of the phone (in fact, it is etched in the back).

Features that nobody wants
When I press the home key slightly too quickly, a very slow and clunky application pops up that overrides my silent volume setting and chimes "Say a command". I usually get here when I am trying to exit a hung application in order to go through the ten stop process to kill it. However, I get redirected to conversation mode. I've tried "Go fuck yourself" or "Eat shit" but it just responds with "Did you say ... Call Mom?"

And finally, Blockbuster. Costumers are literally going way out of their way, with the possibility of bricking their phone in order to remove their application from the default install list. That's how bad blockbuster actually is. People hack their phone to uninstall it.

Conclusion
I know how hard it is to make an Operating System; but having things like the video recorder crashing the phone should have been caught in early QA testing; a user trying swype for five minutes would notice the expansive vocabulary that the phone guesses when you are trying to say "I am outside near the gas station", and they should have noticed way early that they literally cut the phones battery life by 70% ... and then should have been like "hrmm ... let's not release this."

This version is a major disappointment. It's such an important time too; Google has an opportunity to really snatch the marketshare from Apple; but it's not going to happen with crap like this.