scott.hodson.blog

I was invited to a Microsoft Insider meeting yesterday at the Fox Sports Grill in Irvine. I appreciated the invite, nice dinner, bowling, swag, and the presentation about the Windows Mobile platforms and various Windows Mobile and Pocket PC devices they were showing off and demonstrating. There were a few “NDA” items they asked us not to share, so I won’t, but I had one curious observation.

While talking about Pocket PC they started talking about ROM updates of phones. The gist was basically if you buy a phone where the manufacturer hastily released the Windows Mobile/Pocket PC OS on it without enough testing, that if you have problems don’t call Microsoft, call the manufacturer and/or the carrier, but either way, don’t expect to get any help or support, and especially don’t expect to get any ROM updates to your phone. So, unlike a PC, you most likely can’t upgrade the OS and the only recourse is to buy another phone. Microsoft encourages the OEMs to thoroughly test their devices with the OS to make sure everything is compatible and washes their hands of it if it’s not.

While that doesn’t necessarily surprise or bother me, I was struck by the comment that one Microsoft sales/marketing guy, who had a Windows Mobile phone, was bragging that he hadn’t rebooted his phone in almost 6 days, as if that was a great milestone. Now, my Motorola V60 phone is a few year old, so it doesn’t have cameras, color, much in terms of games, Java, etc., it’s a phone, and very good at being a phone I just keep in my pocket with a long battery life. I’ve never needed to reboot it for any reason ever, though I have turned it off sometimes for various reasons, like when I don’t want to receive any phone calls or I want it to recharge more quickly.

So as my V60 ages and is not 100% incompatible with T-Mobile’s newer voicemail service (thanks to Paris Hilton), and as I shop for a newer replacement phone, I wonder if I need to spend hundreds of dollars for a phone that’s going to reboot at least once a week. I guess it’s not a real annoyance, I mean, it’s not like I’m going to lose all kinds of data (code, documents), but I’d hate to have to call someone back to tell them “I’m sorry, my phone had a core dump, had to reboot.”