Verizon Charges Motorola Droid Users for Exchange Access

Verizon Wireless loves to nickel and dime its customers and the upcoming Motorola Droid presents new opportunities.

Droid supports Microsoft Exchange’s ActiveSync feature that lets users access email, calendar and contacts from their corporate servers running Exchange. But now they will have to pay for the privilege, says InfoWorld.

Droid users will have to pay at least an additional $15 a month on top of their data plan for Exchange access. That means $45 a month including Exchange support instead of $30 a month for a data only plan. Droid will be exclusively available on the Verizon network for $200 and with a two-year contract.

Verizon says the additional fees are justified because the Droid is a primarily targeted at consumers. The fee also applies to all smartphones, including the BlackBerry, that want to access corporate email, says Verizon.

But that may not be telling the whole story. In the case of the BlackBerry, users pay additional fees because the phones connect with a company’s BlackBerry Enterprise Systems and not the consumer-focused BlackBerry Internet System, points out Mashable. And that involves additional licensing fees.

The Droid, though, runs the open source and free Android 2.0 platform with ActiveSync support already built in. That means users shouldn’t have to pay extra fees for their device to connect with their corporate servers.

It also defeats some of the good intentions behind Android. Wasn’t Android expected to help bring in cost savings for carriers and consumers?

This is just plain bad business by Verizon. They shouldn’t have charged for this as it’s built in free into the Android 2.0 operating system.