Motorola Razr V3

I'd like to say I've never owned one of these. Unfortunately, my daughter has owned three--none of them for more than a month. The $5 a month I paid for insurance on her phone is probably going to be some of the best money I've ever spent.

On two, even with the phone set to ring, and with good reception, sometimes it would just sit there silently during an incoming call, not even vibrating. On a third, the camera stopped working.

On any of them, even if everything was working correctly, Verizon created rather unique problems through attempting to drive people to Verizon's proprietary software for handling photos. Verizon disables the photo processing portion of the Motorola Phone Tools that you can purchase for use with the Razr. And the Razr has no removable data card. Therefore, the only way to get photos from the phone to the computer, is to e-mail them or post them to Verizon's Pix Place. Problem is, if you take the photo at the highest resolution, you can end up with a file too large to do either, meaning, that photo is stuck on the phone. You can look at it there. Or you can delete it. That's all.

The fourth time she went in to exchange the phone (another one that would sometimes just not ring), Verizon finally agreed to give her a different phone--a Samsung. We've had four Samsungs in the family already. Each has lasted its full two years before trading in for an upgrade. Each has been a great phone.