Windows Mobile
One of the things I dislike about my Windows Mobile 5 device is that it falls painfully between the two stools of reliability and debuggability. Take as an example its WiFi functionality.A large proportion of the time it won't connect to a wireless network. This is annoying. I can't imagine this happening with a laptop, or a Nintendo DS, or the 9300i. The interesting thing is the approach it takes to handling this.
Some devices will do anything they can, so they end up pretty reliable — I don't care what it has to do to achieve my goal. If it fails after the device has tried everything, there's not much more I can do. This is a reasonable tradeoff for a device like a mobile phone. The WM5 device clearly does not do this — sometimes it connects easily, and rebooting has a good chance of getting it to work. That's just shoddy.
The other option is to do what ‘proper’ OSes tend to do — provide a troubleshooter, logs, debugging messages, and so on to allow me to try to fix whatever is wrong and allow normal operation to proceed. WM5 doesn't do this, either — it does one of (a) try forever, silently; (b) say “couldn't get an IP address”. It's almost like they took a desktop, rather than mobile, approach to functionality — it's not perfect, but we can try to fix it later — and then decided that error messages and logs didn't fit in the mobile paradigm, and took them out.
The upshot is that I have a device that neither works nor allows me to fix it. This is in stark contrast to every device that I would consider ‘good‘ or ‘reliable’.
In case you thought this was limited to WiFi, the exact same thing happens to the VPN. Rarely it works over WiFi, but it doesn't work at all over EDGE, and the brief error message (“check your settings”) is no use at all trying to debug the issue. Oh, and the camera, too (“couldn't connect to the imaging device”?!).
Next time I think I'll go for another Nokia, regardless of its paucity of RAM.
Posted at 2006-07-28 09:37:29 by Richard • Link to Windows Mobile
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